Moons of Pluto while searching for Plutonian rings. Styx, announced on 7 July 2012, was discovered while looking for potential hazards for "New Horizons". Charon is about half the diameter of Pluto and is so massive (nearly one eighth of the mass of Pluto) that the system's barycenter lies between them, approximately 960 km above Pluto's surface. Charon and Pluto are also tidally locked, so that they always present the same face toward each other. The IAU General Assembly in August 2006 considered a proposal that Pluto and Charon be reclassified as a double planet, but the proposal was abandoned. Pluto's four small
How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming is the 2010 memoir by Mike Brown, the American astronomer most responsible for the reclassification of the former planet Pluto from planet to dwarf planet. The memoir is an account of the events surrounding the redefinition of the term "planet" that eventually changed the status of Pluto. It chronicles the discovery of Eris, a dwarf planet then mistakenly thought to be larger than Pluto, located within the scattered disc, beyond Neptune's orbit. The replaying of events includes the adversarial challenging