Pluto may have another 10 or More Moons: Study

Pluto may have another 10 or more undiscovered moons around it, a new study recently said. The finding might complicate the flight of NASA's New Horizons mission, which was expected to fly near the dwarf planet in 2015, according to Space.com.

Astronomers' prediction of the number of moons around the dwarf planet came after simulations were run at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to safely guide the New Horizons Mission. The study is published in The Astronomical Journal, reports Space.com.

Last year, NASA had reported the discovery of a fifth moon around Pluto, estimated to be 6 to 15 miles across.

The size of the new moons are expected to be about 0.6 miles to 1.8 miles across, so tiny and always covered in a cloud of dust, that it is impossible to see them from Earth.

Researchers aren't sure where the dust cloud around Pluto came from. One of the theories is that the dwarf planet might have collided with its largest moon Charon, which led to the dwarf producing debris. Another theory is that Pluto got the dust cloud from the protoplanetary disk that gave birth to the solar system.

"Pluto is so bright. I don't think a ground-based telescope would have a chance, and it's at the limit of what HST (Hubble Space Telescope) can do," Scott Kenyon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and lead author of the study told Space.com. Kenyon's new study can be read here.

NASA had launched the New Horizons spacecraft in the year 2006. The mission is now half-way between the Earth and Pluto and is expected to have a dramatic flight past Pluto in the year 2015.