Tag: Moon

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Dancing with the Stars by James Penha

Pluto kissed Charon:
pas de deux of rock and ice—
now their solo turns

by James Penha

I shall use the headlines of The Guardian story as the ideal brief explanation of the recently-published research and of my sciku: “‘Kiss and capture’: scientists offer new theory on how Pluto got its largest moon. Findings suggest Charon collided with dwarf planet and then pair briefly rotated together before separating.”

Further reading:

‘Capture of an ancient Charon around Pluto’, 2025, Denton, C.A., Asphaug, E., Emsenhuber, A., & Melikyan, R., Nature Geoscience, available: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41561-024-01612-0

‘‘Kiss and capture’: scientists offer new theory on how Pluto got its largest moon’, 2025, Davis, N., The Guardian, available: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/jan/06/new-theory-how-pluto-got-its-largest-moon-charon

‘Pluto May Have Captured Its Biggest Moon After an Ancient Dance and Kiss’, 2025, O’Callaghan, J., The New York Times, available: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/08/science/pluto-moon-kiss-charon.html

Author bio:

Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him 🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. You can find out more about James’ poetry on his website https://jamespenha.com and catch up with him on BlueSky @jamespenha.bsky.social

Read more of James’ sciku here.

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Suspended by Michele Rule

Metal formation
Buried deep inside the moon
Suspended mass

by Michele Rule

When I read about the discovery of a huge metal mass buried deep underground below the surface of the moon, I immediately jumped to the idea of a spaceship crash site. But reading more I learned about several possible causes, one being an asteroid crash and the other related to the magma solidification of the Moon’s surface. Both involved the suspension of a metal “structure” in a large mass, five times the size of the big island of Hawai’i.

Further reading:

‘Astronomers Discover ‘Deep Structure’ Under Moon’s Largest Crater’, Futurism: https://futurism.com/the-byte/deep-structure-mass-moon-crater

‘Deep Structure of the Lunar South Pole-Aitken Basin’, Geophysical Research Letters: https://doi.org/10.1029/2019GL082252

Author bio:

Michele Rule lives in Kelowna BC where she writes poems and stories with two dogs, two cats and a supportive partner. Her first book is “Around the World in 15 Haiku”. You can find more of her writing via Linktree and on Twitter @michelerule.

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Saturn’s Moons by petro c. k.

Saturn’s moons
enough thumbnails
to fill a jar

By petro c. k.

Saturn has the most moons of any planet in the solar system. As of now there are 83 confirmed moons that aren’t part of Saturn’s ring structure, of which 20 are still unnamed.

Saturn’s rings are made up of orbiting objects ranging in size from microscopic to moonlets hundreds of meters across. So far over 150 moonlets have been detected within the rings but the precise number of Saturnian moons cannot be determined since there is no objective boundary between the countless small anonymous objects that form Saturn’s rings and the larger objects that have been named as moons, but the moonlets that have been detected within the ring system are considered a small amount of the total amount actually there.

Current advances in the technology of telescopes as well as observations by unmanned spacecraft have lead to recent discoveries, with 20 new satellites discovered in 2019 alone, allowing Saturn to overtake Jupiter as the planet with the most known moons.

Postscript: In the interval between the writing of this verse and background information, more moons have been found around Jupiter, overtaking Saturn for the most moons:

Further reading:

‘Saturn’s moons: Facts about the weird and wonderful satellites of the ringed planet’, Space.com: https://www.space.com/20812-saturn-moons.html

‘Saturn Moons’, NASA: https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/moons/saturn-moons/overview/

‘Astronomers discover 12 new moons around Jupiter, putting count at record-breaking 92’, CBS News: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/astronomers-12-new-moons-record/

Author bio:

petro c. k. is a temporal being on a habitable rock spinning in space that tries to compress observations of an infinitesimally small section of the universe into haiku. You can catch up with them on Twitter here: @petro_ck

Check out other sciku by petro c. k. here: ‘Young Star’, ‘Marble’, and ‘Giggling’.

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Leto’s Children

Does Demeter know
of your lunar harvest plans?
Rooted regoliths.

Humanity has long looked at the moon and wondered if and how we could colonise it. How would we survive? What would we eat? Could we ever plant crops on the moon?

Yet for over 50 years the possibility of answering this third question has been within our reach. The Apollo 11, 12 and 17 missions all brought back samples of lunar regolith – a fine grey soil found on the moon’s surface. If earth plants can grow in lunar soil then the idea of growing crops on the moon isn’t entirely in the realm of science fiction.

With the start of NASA’s Artemis program in 2017 (which aims to get humans back to the moon by 2025) interest in the potential for lunar soil has increased. Paul et al. (2022) were given permission to test whether mouse-ear cress (Arabidopsis thaliana) would grow in lunar regolith.

They found that the plants sprouted from seeds and grew, although they were slow to develop, showed signs of stress and differentially expressed genes indicating ionic stresses. Whilst plenty of small steps are needed to understand how to mitigate these issues, the fact that the plants grew at all is a huge leap for humanity’s dreams of colonising the moon.

This poem plays with ancient Geek mythology. Leto is the goddess of motherhood and fertility and the mother of Artemis and Apollo (who the NASA space programs are named after). Demeter is the goddess of the harvest. Artemis is the goddess of the hunt, nature and the moon. Apollo is the god of the sun, music and, fittingly, poetry.

Further reading: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03334-8