Image credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute, of Pluto and Charon, to scale and with comparatively accurate brightnesses.

Why are Pluto and Charon so different?

The two best-explored outer Solar System worlds orbit one another. But no one was prepared for what New Horizons saw.

Ethan Siegel
Starts With A Bang!
7 min readJan 13, 2016

--

“Just as a Chihuahua is still a dog, these ice dwarfs are still planetary bodies. The misfit becomes the average. The Pluto-like objects are more typical in our solar system than the nearby planets we

--

--

Ethan Siegel
Starts With A Bang!

The Universe is: Expanding, cooling, and dark. It starts with a bang! #Cosmology Science writer, astrophysicist, science communicator & NASA columnist.