Adding to the growing compendium of Kuiper belt objects, astronomers have spotted two new moons orbiting Pluto. Observations with the Hubble Space Telescope from May of last year show two tiny dots revolving around the same center of gravity as the ninth planet and its largest moon, Charon. Reporting the finding today in Nature, the researchers speculate that the tiny companions formed in the same cataclysmic collision that produced Charon.
"We used Hubble's exceptional resolution to peer close to Pluto and pick out two small moons that had eluded detection for more than 75 years," says Hal Weaver, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the discovery team leader. "That was somewhat surprising because ground-based observers had been trying for more than a decade to find new satellites around Pluto," adds astronomer Max Mutchler of the Space Telescope Science Institute, the first to see the moons in Hubble's images.
The moons have not been named yet. We should go on all the Firefly boards and start a petition to name one of them 'ita.'