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- Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld. This was proposed by Venetia Burney an eleven year old schoolgirl from Oxford, England.
- Pluto was reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006. This is when the IAU formalised the definition of a planet as “A planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.”
- Pluto was discovered on February 18th, 1930 by the Lowell Observatory. For the 76 years between Pluto being discovered and the time it was reclassified as a dwarf planet it completed under a third of its orbit around the Sun.
- Pluto has five known moons. The moons are Charon (discovered in 1978,), Hydra and Nix (both discovered in 2005), Kerberos originally P4 (discovered 2011) and Styx originally P5 (discovered 2012) official designations S/2011 (134340) 1 and S/2012 (134340) 1.
Learn about Pluto's discovery, namesake, size, orbit, moons, surface, atmosphere, and potential for life. Find out how Pluto differs from the planets and why it was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006.
It contrasts the darker, cratered terrain of Belton Regio at lower left. Surface temp. Pluto ( minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most- massive known object to directly orbit the Sun.
Learn about Pluto, the dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, from NASA's New Horizons mission. Find out its history, features, moons, and more in articles, images, and 3D models.
Learn about Pluto's discovery, namesake, size, orbit, moons, surface, atmosphere, and more. Find out why Pluto is a dwarf planet and how it differs from the other planets in our solar system.
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Jun 13, 2024 · Learn fun facts about Pluto, the dwarf planet in the Kuiper Belt, and its moon Charon. Find out why Pluto is not a planet, how it orbits the Sun, and what NASA's New Horizons spacecraft discovered there.
Jun 25, 2024 · Pluto’s mean distance from the Sun, about 5.9 billion km (3.7 billion miles or 39.5 astronomical units ), gives it an orbit larger than that of the outermost planet, Neptune. (One astronomical unit [AU] is the average distance from Earth to the Sun—about 150 million km [93 million miles].)
