Pluto's Moons' Motion Perplexes NASA Scientists with Sheer Pandemonium (VIDEO)

First Posted: Nov 10, 2015 09:59 AM EST

NASA's New Horizon spacecraft is continuing to send information about Pluto to scientists on Earth. Now, four months after the flyby, researchers are learning more than ever about the dwarf planet and its strange moons.

In fact, scientists have made more than 50 exciting discovers about Pluto due to New Horizons. For example, Pluto has a varied, active surface. In addition, its moons are far weirder than anyone expected.

"The New Horizons mission has taken what we thought we knew about Pluto and turned it upside down," said Jim Green, director of planetary science as NASA Headquarters in Washington, in a news release. "It's why we explore-to satisfy our innate curiosity and answer deeper questions about how we got here and what lies beyond the next horizon."

Pluto's moons are also more complex than first realized. New results show that the orbits of Pluto's four smallest moons are more chaotic than expected.

"The way I would describe this system is not just chaos, but pandemonium," said Mark Showalter, co-investigator on the New Horizons mission, during a news conference on Nov. 9 at the meeting of the Division for Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. "We honestly have not seen anything like this before, and we still don't know what to make of it."

In fact, a new animation of Pluto's moons shows that they behave a bit like spinning tops, which is in sharp contrast to moons that keep one face pointed toward their central planet-like our own moon.

As New Horizons continues to send more and more data about Pluto, scientists will continue to make new discovers about the Pluto system.