A Captivating Encounter: How a ‘Kiss and Capture’ Theory Gave Birth to Charon, Pluto’s Majestic Moon


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Pluto and Charon

A composite of enhanced color snapshots of Pluto (lower right) and Charon (upper left), captured by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on July 14, 2015.
NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI

The “demoted” dwarf planet Pluto along with its largest moon Charon form an extraordinary duo, and for many years, scientists have been deliberating on how this binary system—in which each body revolves around the other—originated. With Charon being half the size of Pluto, experts have faced challenges explaining how it found its place in the dwarf planet’s sphere.

Now, a group of researchers has proposed that Pluto may have acquired Charon through a recently defined “kiss and capture” phenomenon that contests earlier hypotheses. Their findings were released on Monday in the publication Nature Geoscience.

The novel hypothesis indicates that billions of years prior, Pluto and Charon collided in the distant outskirts of the outer solar system. Instead of completely destroying one another, the two celestial objects melded together in a rotating snowman formation (the kiss) for approximately 10 to 15 hours before parting ways—but in the end, they continued to be bound in each other’s orbits (the capture). Despite the impact, both the dwarf planet and its moon would likely have remained largely intact.

“The majority of planetary collision scenarios are categorized as ‘hit and run’ or ‘graze and merge.’ What we have uncovered is something wholly distinct—a ‘kiss and capture’ situation where the bodies collide, adhere momentarily, and then separate while still retaining their gravitational connection,” explains planetary scientist Adeene Denton, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory and principal author of the study, in a statement.

“I had always presumed that any collision between planetary entities hundreds of kilometers wide would obliterate the smaller one if it were captured,” David Rothery, a planetary geoscientist at the Open University in England who was not part of the study, informs New Scientist’s Alex Wilkins.

kiss and capture mechanism

The proposed kiss and capture of Charon by Pluto, depicted hours post-collision, at the moment of separation
Robert Melikyan and Adeene Denton

Previously, researchers had theorized that Charon formed through an alternate mechanism: A massive celestial body violently collided with Pluto, generating significant heat from the impact that would have caused the bodies to behave in a fluid-like manner, akin to silly putty or blobs in a lava lamp. It is widely accepted that Earth’s moon formed in a similar manner.

Nonetheless, Pluto and Charon are markedly different from our Earth and moon. While the moon clearly orbits Earth, Pluto and Charon revolve around each other. “Charon is ENORMOUS in relation to Pluto, to the extent that they effectively form a binary system,” Denton elaborates to Space.com’s Robert Lea. “[Charon] measures half the size of Pluto and constitutes 12 percent of its mass.” In comparison, our moon is about 27 percent of Earth’s size. (However, this is still more comparable to Charon and Pluto than other moon-planet pairs in our solar system—Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, is 1/28 the size of the gas giant.)

The distinctions do not end there—the investigators also maintain that Pluto and Charon are less likely to behave like fluids during a collision. The dwarf planet along with its moon “are relatively small, so the assumption that they are liquid bodies likely does not hold,” Denton asserts to New Scientist. They also primarily consist of rock and ice—properties that afford structural integrity—which earlier examinations had neglected.

The team conducted advanced computational simulations of the Pluto-Charon impact while incorporating these essential structural traits. Consequently, their models unveiled the unprecedented “kiss and capture” cosmic collision process for the first time.

“We found that if we presume Pluto and Charon are entities with material robustness, it is indeed possible for Pluto to capture Charon from a significant impact,” Denton clarifies to Space.com. “We were quite taken aback by the ‘kiss’ component of kiss-and-capture,” she proceeds. “There hasn’t really been a type of impact before in which the two bodies merely temporarily merge before separating again!”

The model accurately forecasted the present orbit of the binary system, providing further assurance in its validity.

“As Pluto is spinning rapidly before the impact, and Charon is mostly outside their corotation zone, it can ‘push’ Charon away, which causes Charon to gradually move outward,” Denton informs Guardian’s Nicola Davis. She adds that the collision may have heralded a new geological era for Pluto, whose surface was examined in 2015 by the New Horizons space probe.

Among various inquiries, the team now aims to explore how this new model might have influenced the geological characteristics of the bodies—including possible subsurface oceans—as well as whether the “kiss and capture” method could be responsible for other binary systems throughout the universe.

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