Pluto's Extra Moon

These posts are coming in fast succession. I guess I'm making up for their absence. It could work, get bored, write a blog post, but really I get the feeling it should be, get bored, get off my lazy ass and study for history because my half yearlies are next week.




So anyway, last night I watched six hours straight of Voyage to the Planets and have no idea how I managed it. The Saturnian system is by far my favourite, and I find it uncanny how much Miamis looks like the Death star

 Titan is also pretty epic. You know, what with the methane rivers, freezing lava flows and dunes made of frozen atmospheric hydrocarbons. Practically the whole place is flammable!

That's smog by the way, Titan has a ridiculously thick atmosphere, for a moon anyway.


Other cool stuff in our wide wide solar system include these crazy geysers on Neptune's moon Triton.

Yeah, they go up and then take a 90 degree turn as they reach the top of Triton's thin atmosphere. Triton is the only large moon to have a retrograde orbit, and, because of this and its composition-similar to Pluto's, is thought to have originated from the Kuiper belt.


Miranda is a moon of Uranus, and has the highest cliffs in the solar system.

It is belived that the moon has been snap frozen halfway through a process where larger bits of rock sink to the bottom of the planet. This leaves us with really high cliffs, so high, that because of the low gravity on the moon, you could jump off and casually wait the ten or so minutes it would take you to get to the ground.


The moons of Uranus are mostly named after characters from Shakespeare. This means that there is a moon called Puck.


Puck


It is just about the awesomest name for a moon in the history of ever. Puck




So, after becoming all hyped up about the planets, I decided to take a simple quiz on Space.com the last question was something like "how many moons does Pluto have", me of course, put three, Charon, Nix and Hydra, though the Charon-Pluto relationship is more like that of a double planet. Actually, there are four. The fourth was discovered in mid 2011, it is called S/2011 P1, yeah, great name. And its smaller than Nix. SMALLER THAN NIX. This thing is tiny, really really tiny. It orbits in the gap between Nix and Hydra and is really, quite small.

Its also called P4, 'cause it's the fourth moon of Pluto


It was discovered when a team of astronomers went looking for rings around Pluto, and used eight minute exposures, longer than any others, so P4 was spotted and confirmed.


Ok, bye internet, hope you enjoyed my moon splurge.