There’s a chaotic dance going on at the far end of our solar system, involving Pluto and five of its closest friends, a new study finds.
Hubble Space Telescope images of Pluto; its largest moon, Charon; and tinier moons Styx, Nix, Hydra and Kerberos show the odd rhythmic gyrations of the six distant objects in a dance unlike anything in our solar system.
What makes it so odd is that there’s a double set of dances going on. First, Pluto and Charon are locked together in their own waltz “as if they are a dumbbell” with a rod connecting them. It’s the solar system’s only binary planet system, even though neither is technically a planet.
“It’s pretty darn weird,” said Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute.
Meanwhile, the four little moons circle the Pluto-Charon combo, wobbling a bit when they go closer to either Pluto or Charon.
They also interact when they near one another. So it seems like they all dance to one overarching beat but not quite in the same way, just doing their own thing, said planetary scientist Heidi Hammel of the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy.
“It’s kind of like you’d see at a Grateful Dead concert,” she said.
