New Moon Discovered in Our Solar System [Astronomy]

New Moon Discovered in Our Solar System [Astronomy]:
A team of astronomers has photographed a new moon in our solar system using the Hubble Space Telescope. The new celestial object is orbiting Pluto. Mark Showalter—from the SETI Institute (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence) in Mountain View, California—is intrigued that such a small planet "can have such a complex collection of satellites."
Showalter and the rest of Team Pluto think that these moons are the result of massive collision between Pluto and another large object from the Kuiper Belt, the cloud of objects in the outer rim of the Solar System.
According to Showalter, "the moons form a series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls." The team believes that this new moon—the fifth after Charon, Hydra, Nix and P4—indicates that there must be a lot more smaller objects that we can't see from here.
Harold Weaver—at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland—says that "the discovery of so many small moons indirectly tells us that there must be lots of small particles lurking unseen in the Pluto system."
This increases the danger for New Horizons, the spaceship now en route to the frozen dwarf planet and the Kuiper Belt at 30,000 miles per hour. That's precisely why this team has been taking a closer look. According to the mission's principal investigator—Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado—the "inventory of the Pluto system we're taking now with Hubble will help the New Horizons team design a safer trajectory for the spacecraft."
New Horizons will give us the first close up look of the dwarf planet, which used to be the ninth planet of our solar system before being demoted in 2008.
Perhaps the discovery of this new moon—six to 15 miles across and orbiting 58,000 miles around Pluto—will make the fans of the ex-planet happier. Pluto was considered to be a solitary planet until 1978, when the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. discovered Charon. In 2006, Hubble discovered Nix and Hydra. P4 was discovered in 2011. [NASA]