Pluto is the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system and used to be considered the ninth and most distant planet from the sun.

The strange world is located in the Kuiper Belt, a zone beyond the orbit of Neptune brimming with hundreds of thousands of rocky, icy bodies each larger than 62 miles (100 kilometers) across as well as 1 trillion or more comets.

Pluto stopped being a planet in 2006 when it was reclassified as a dwarf planet, a demotion that attracted controversy and stirred debate in the scientific community and among the general public.

American astronomer Percival Lowell first suggested that Pluto existed in 1905 when he observed strange deviations in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Lowell thought there must be another whose gravity is tugging on these ice giants, causing discrepancies in their orbits. Lowell proceeded to predict the mystery planet's location in 1915 but died 15 years before its discovery. Pluto was eventually discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory, based on predictions by Lowell and other astronomers.

Pluto got its name from 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England, who suggested to her grandfather that the new world get its name from the Roman god of the underworld. Her grandfather then passed the name on to Lowell Observatory. The name also honors Percival Lowell, whose initials are the first two letters of Pluto.

WHAT DOES PLUTO LOOK LIKE?

Since Pluto is so far from Earth, little was known about the dwarf planet's size or surface conditions until 2015, when NASA's New Horizons space probe made a close flyby of Pluto. New Horizons showed that Pluto has a diameter of 1,473 miles (2,370 km), less than one-fifth the diameter of Earth, and only about two-thirds as wide as Earth's moon.

Observations of Pluto's surface by the New Horizons spacecraft revealed a variety of surface features, including mountains that reach as high as 11,000 feet (3,500 meters), comparable to the Rocky Mountains on Earth. While methane and nitrogen ice cover much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to support such enormous peaks, so scientists suspect that the mountains are formed on a bedrock of water ice.

Pluto's surface is also covered in an abundance of methane ice, but New Horizons scientists have observed significant differences in the way the ice reflects light across the dwarf planet's surface. The dwarf planet also possesses ice ridge terrain that appears to look like a snakeskin; astronomers spotted similar features to Earth's penitentes, or erosion-formed features on mountainous terrain. The Pluto features are much larger; they are estimated at 1,650 feet (500 m) tall, while the Earth features are only a few meters in size.

Another distinct feature on Pluto's surface is a large heart-shaped region known unofficially as Tombaugh Regio (after Clyde Tombaugh; regio is Latin for region). The left side of the region (an area that takes on the shape of an ice cream cone) is covered in carbon monoxide ice. Other variations in the composition of surface materials have been identified within the "heart" of Pluto.

WHAT IS PLUTO MADE OF?

Some of Pluto's parameters, according to NASA(opens in new tab):

Atmospheric composition: Methane, nitrogen. Observations by New Horizons show that Pluto's atmosphere extends as far as 1,000 miles (1,600 km) above the surface of the dwarf planet.

Magnetic field: It remains unknown whether Pluto has a magnetic field, but the dwarf planet's small size and slow rotation suggest it has little to no such field.

Chemical composition: Pluto probably consists of a mixture of 70 percent rock and 30 percent water ice.

Internal structure: The dwarf planet probably has a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of water ice, with more exotic ices such as methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ice coating the surface.

PLUTO MOONS

Pluto has five moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos and Hydra, with Charon being the closest to Pluto and Hydra the most distant.

In 1978, astronomers discovered that Pluto had a very large moon nearly half the dwarf planet's own size. This moon was dubbed Charon, after the mythological demon who ferried souls to the underworld in Greek mythology.

Because Charon and Pluto are so similar in size, their orbit is unlike that of most planets and their moons. Both Pluto and Charon orbit a point in space that lies between them, similar to the orbits of binary star systems, For this reason, scientists refer to Pluto and Charon as a double dwarf planet, double planet or binary system.

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