New research suggests that billions of years ago, Pluto may have captured its largest moon, Charon, with a very brief icy "kiss." The theory could explain how the dwarf planet (yeah, we wish Pluto was still a planet, too) could snare a moon that is around half its size.
The team behind this research thinks that two frigid worlds located in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy bodies located far from the sun at the edge of the solar system, collided together billions of years ago. Rather than mutually obliterating each other, the two bodies were united as a spinning "cosmic snowman." These bodies separated relatively quickly but remained orbitally linked to create the Pluto/Charon system we see today.
