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Pluto's reign. For decades, students learned the phrase "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas" to remember the order of the planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars ...
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. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
Nix is a natural satellite of Pluto, with a diameter of 49.8 km (30.9 mi) across its longest dimension. [3] It was discovered along with Pluto's outermost moon Hydra on 15 May 2005 by astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope, [1] and was named after Nyx, the Greek goddess of the night. [10]
"Pluto is the first planetary body we know of where the atmospheric energy budget is dominated by solid-phase haze particles instead of by gases." Pluto is way cooler than it should be, and now we ...
Both the Earth–Moon and Pluto–Charon systems are thought to have been formed as a result of giant impacts: one body was impacted by a second body, resulting in a debris disk, and through accretion, either two new bodies formed or one new body formed, with the larger body remaining (but changed). However, a giant impact is not a sufficient ...
For 76 years, Pluto was considered our solar system's ninth planet — so, what caused it to lose its status?
[6] [a] Charon and Pluto are also tidally locked, so that they always present the same face toward each other. The IAU General Assembly in August 2006 considered a proposal that Pluto and Charon be reclassified as a double planet, but the proposal was abandoned. [7] Like Pluto, Charon is a perfect sphere to within measurement uncertainty. [8]
Astronomers believe a planetary body collided with Pluto early in its history to create a gigantic heart-shaped feature on the dwarf planet.