NASA Telescope Finds New Details About Pluto’s Largest Moon

New information about Pluto’s largest moon that was revealed by a NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) telescope was shared publicly this week.
The journal Nature Communications on Tuesday published a study detailing NASA’s Webb Space Telescope’s recent discovery of traces of carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide on the surface of the Pluto moon known as Charon. The moon is roughly half of the size of Pluto.
Earlier studies, including NASA’s New Horizons 2015 flyby, confirmed the presence of water ice on the moon’s surface. However, it wasn’t until the James Webb Space Telescope began its observations that scientists were able to detect hidden chemicals at specific infrared wavelengths, providing crucial new insights.
“There’s a lot of fingerprints of chemicals that we otherwise wouldn’t get to see,” Carly Howett, a New Horizons scientist, told The Associated Press. Howett was not involved in the most recent study released by NASA.
Pluto, classified as a dwarf planet, and its moons reside in the distant Kuiper Belt at the outer edges of our solar system. In addition to water ice, past observations have detected ammonia and organic compounds on Charon. Both Pluto and Charon are more than 3 billion miles (4.83 billion kilometers) from the sun, making them far too cold to sustain life.
Scientists believe that hydrogen peroxide on Charon’s surface likely forms when radiation interacts with water molecules, according to Silvia Protopapa of the Southwest Research Institute. Protopapa, co-author of the study published in Nature Communications, added that carbon dioxide may be released to the surface following impacts from space debris.
This latest discovery is crucial for understanding the origins of Charon and could offer valuable insights into the composition of other distant moons and planets, helping scientists piece together the mysteries of our solar system’s outer reaches.
According to NASA, Charon was first discovered in 1978 by James Christy and Robert Harrington at the U.S. Naval Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
“Christy noticed images of Pluto were strangely elongated. The blob seemed to move around Pluto. The direction of elongation cycled back and forth over 6.39 days – Pluto’s rotation period. Searching through their archives of Pluto images taken years before, Christy found more cases where Pluto appeared elongated. Additional images confirmed he had discovered the first known moon of Pluto,” NASA said on its website.
According to NASA, Christy then proposed the name Charon “after the mythological ferryman who carried souls across the river Acheron, one of the five mythical rivers that surrounded Pluto’s underworld.”
This article includes reporting from The Associated Press.