Article Posted on : - Jul 21, 2011

The labeled images of the Pluto system, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 ultraviolet visible instrument with newly discovered fourth moon P4 circled. Photo: NASA.

WASHINGTON (BNS): NASA's Hubble telescope has discovered a new moon around Pluto which is temporarily named as P4, NASA said.

The new images have been taken by Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field Camera 3 ultraviolet visible instrument who was surveying for rings around Pluto.

The tiny satellite is estimated to be between 8 and 21 miles (13 to 34 kilometers) wide. For comparison, Pluto's largest moon Charon is 648 miles (1,043 km) across. The dwarf planet's other moons, Nix and Hydra, range between 20 to 70 miles across (32 to 113 km).

"I find it remarkable that Hubble's cameras enabled us to see such a tiny object so clearly from a distance of more than 3 billion miles (5 billion km)," Mark Showalter of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California, said in a statement.

Pluto's new moon is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, which Hubble also discovered in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978 at the US Naval Observatory and was first resolved using Hubble in 1990 as a separate body from Pluto.

The finding is a result of ongoing work to support NASA's New Horizons mission, which is scheduled to fly through the Pluto system in 2015.

Hubble's photos of Pluto's surface and the discovery of its satellites have been invaluable for planning for New Horizons' close encounter.