• Question: Is the moon bigger than Pluto?

    Asked by Bradley to Christie, Dan, David, Dawn, Sian on 20 Jun 2016.
    • Photo: Christie Waddington

      Christie Waddington answered on 20 Jun 2016:

      Short answer is yes :-). The moon is about 3500km wide, whereas Pluto is about 2400km wide. Even the mass of the moon is bigger! The moon has a mass of 7.4 x 10^22kg whereas Pluto is only 1.3 x 10^22 kg. Even though Pluto was demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet, the moon is not a planet of any sort. There are two possible reasons for this:
      1. The moon doesn’t orbit the sun, it orbits the Earth.
      2. The planets were formed from a giant nebula (massive and dense cloud of stars) including the sun, whereas the moon was probably formed from a giant asteroid hitting the earth at some point.

    • Photo: Sian Thomas

      Sian Thomas answered on 22 Jun 2016:

      So the answer seems to be yes !

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