Pluto and Charon’s meet-cute may have started with a kiss. New computer simulations of the dwarf planet and its largest moon suggest that the pair got together in a “kiss-and-capture” collision, where the two bodies briefly joined up before settling into their current positions.
“It’s a U-Haul situation,” says planetary scientist Adeene Denton of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., who reports the results January 6 in Nature Geoscience. “They kiss and they say, ‘Yeah, this is it. I want to build a system together with you.’ And then they do.”
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