Scientists have theorized for decades that Pluto's unusually large moon Charon formed through a process similar to Earth's moon – a massive collision between two planet-sized bodies, that left Pluto and Charon behind. The process by which this giant impact occurred, and how Charon became subsequently captured as Pluto's satellite, remained poorly understood until recently. In this talk, we'll learn about some of the cutting-edge simulations that revealed new insight into Pluto and Charon's initial collisions, as well as how that impact may have big implications for the system's geological evolution, including how we get to the surfaces that were imaged by New Horizons in 2015.

Bio: Dr. Adeene Denton is a geophysicist and planetary scientist at Southwest Research Institute interested in giant impacts and their influence on the history, evolution and tectonic activity of icy satellites, ocean worlds, and Kuiper Belt Objects. Adeene uses a combination of numerical tools, from shock physics codes to finite element modeling, to explore the effects of giant impacts and their implications for habitability in the outer Solar System. She is trained as a scientist, historian, and dancer, which informs her scientific and artistic research process. Adeene is an avid astrohumanist focused on approaching future planetary exploration from a scientific and humanistic perspective. Asteroid 16883 adeenedenton is named for Adeene’s research on impact processes on outer Solar System worlds, including Pluto.