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Images by NASA<br />
14 seti.org<br />
Pluto’s P4:<br />
Still Nameless<br />
By Mark Showalter<br />
Rings around Pluto? The<br />
idea’s not as crazy as it<br />
sounds. All the outer planets,<br />
starting with Jupiter,<br />
have rings <strong>of</strong> some sort.<br />
Most are just faint clouds <strong>of</strong> dust, visible<br />
only with powerful telescopes.<br />
And although Pluto has been <strong>of</strong>ficially<br />
“downgraded,” a dwarf planet is still a<br />
planet.<br />
Finding rings around Pluto would be<br />
very timely. The New Horizons spacecraft<br />
will fly past this distant object in<br />
July, 2015. The more we can learn about<br />
where to point the cameras, the better.<br />
In a recent proposal we made for observing<br />
time on the Hubble Space Telescope,<br />
we added a brief throw-away<br />
line, “... our observations will also reduce<br />
the current detection threshold<br />
for unseen moons by a factor <strong>of</strong> two.”<br />
Although rings were our intended target,<br />
small moons and faint rings <strong>of</strong>ten<br />
go together. We already know that Pluto<br />
has two 50-km diameter moons, Nix<br />
and Hydra.
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