Pluto has 10 potential moons.
Computer simulations indicate the dwarf planet Pluto might have several additional moons that scientists from the National Aeronautic and Space Administration, or NASA, were previously unaware of.
The discovery of Pluto’s fifth moon last year prompted NASA scientists to research if they needed to redirect the path of the New Horizons spacecraft currently en route and scheduled to flyby Pluto in July of 2015.
They are unsure about how many additional moons Pluto has.
It could be up to 10 moons not including the 5 that have already been discovered.
Because Pluto is so bright, the telescopes on Earth have a hard time picking up images of the moons, (so scientists from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics have made simulations of the moons.
Pluto’s largest moon, named Charon, is so close in size to Pluto that they are thought to be binary dwarf planets.
Doctor Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons NASA mission and an associate vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute said: “We've come to appreciate that those moons, and those not yet discovered there, act as debris generators that populate the Pluto system with shards from small, colliding Kuiper Belt objects."
