Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope to gaze at the edges of the Solar System have spotted two small moons orbiting Pluto, raising its satellite count to three.

Pluto is part of the Kuiper belt, a distant ring of icy rubble beyond Neptune’s orbit that is left over from the formation of the Solar System. Pluto was thought to be a loner when it was discovered as the ninth planet in 1930, but in 1978 its companion moon Charon was spotted.

The two new moons, provisionally called S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2, are about 5,000 times fainter than Pluto. P1, which is between 55 and 160 kilometres across, is about 20% larger than P2, a relative tiddler at between 45 and 130 kilometres.

Their sizes are judged by the amount of light they reflect, but are hard to pin down because astronomers don’t yet know whether the moons’ surfaces are coated with reflective ice, tarry hydrocarbons or something in between.

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October 31st, 2005 | General Science | No comments

Another great example of collaboration and inter-disciplinarity. Scientists at Carnegie Mellon are developping oodles of juicy new technologies that are making the good old Altavista Babelfish translation service look like an illiterate Klingon speaking Portuguese. Gone is the time when you had to write down a speech you wanted translated. Now you can do it all in real-time ! Well, not quite but a couple seconds of delay isn’t that bad…

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October 28th, 2005 | General Science, Technology | No comments