Curated category
Trans-Neptunian satellites
- S/2015 (136472) 1S/2015 (136472) 1, nicknamed MK 2 by its discovery team, is the only known moon of Makemake, a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt.
- Dysnomia (moon)Dysnomia orbits a world so far from the Sun that sunlight takes more than five hours to reach it. It is the only known moon of the dwarf planet Eris, and its…
- Namaka (moon)Namaka is the smaller, inner moon of the dwarf planet Haumea, a body so faint that from Earth it shines at just 1.5% of Haumea's brightness.
- Hiʻiaka (moon)Hiʻiaka is the larger of two known moons circling the dwarf planet Haumea, and it briefly went by another name: Rudolph.
- Vanth (moon)Vanth is the only known moon of Orcus, a large dwarf planet orbiting beyond Neptune, and it sits in a place so remote that its apparent magnitude from Earth…
- Xiangliu (moon)Xiangliu, formally designated 225088 Gonggong I, was not discovered through a pointed telescope aimed at a promising region of sky.
- Styx (moon)Styx is a small natural satellite of Pluto whose discovery was announced on the 11th of July 2012. It measures roughly 16 km across its longest dimension and…
- Kerberos (moon)Kerberos is a small natural satellite of Pluto, and it almost went undetected entirely. When astronomers pointed the Hubble Space Telescope toward Pluto in…
- Nix (moon)Nix is a tiny, tumbling moon of Pluto, so faint that it is about 5,000 times dimmer than the planet it orbits. When astronomers first suspected it might…
- Hydra (moon)Hydra, the outermost moon of Pluto, spins sideways. At the moment the New Horizons spacecraft swept past in July 2015, Hydra's rotational axis was tilted…
- Charon (moon)Charon is the largest moon of the dwarf planet Pluto, and it is strange in almost every way a moon can be. Its mean radius is 606 km, which makes it more…