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Hubble Space Telescope has discovered the fourth moon of Pluto

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Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a small satellite orbiting dwarf planets Pluto, NASA announced Wednesday representatives. Hubble is looking for rings around Pluto, at the edge of our solar system, when discovered P4 - provisional name for the satellite recently found.

With a diameter of between 12-32 kilometers, P4 is the smallest of the four moons of Pluto, NASA experts said.

Charon, the largest of Pluto's satellites, has a diameter of 1043 kilometers and the other two moons, Nix and Hydra, have diameters in the range 32-112 km.

The discovery was made ​​by Mark Showalter, SETI Institute in Mountain View (California), who led the space program.

The Hubble observations are included in a program that supports the New Horizons mission launched by NASA, which hopes to have a "meeting" with Pluto and its moons in 2015.

P4 is located between the orbits of Nix and Hydra, both satellites were discovered by Hubble in 2005. Charon was discovered in 1978, the U.S. Naval Observatory.

Researchers believe that all four moons of Pluto were formed when Pluto and another celestial body the size of a planet collided in the early years of the history of our solar system. Luna, Earth's satellite, could have formed the same way.

P4 was first seen in a photograph taken by Hubble on June 28, and its existence was confirmed on other photographs taken by Hubble, on 3 July and 18 July.

Initially regarded as the farthest planet from the Sun, Pluto was classified as "dwarf planets" by the International Union of astronomers in 2006, reducing to eight the number of planets in our solar system.

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