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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.
Because Pluto did not fit the last of these requirements, after years of debate it was "demoted" to the status of a dwarf planet by a majority vote of the International Astronomical Union at its ...
The timeline of discovery of Solar System planets and their natural satellites charts the progress of the discovery of new bodies over history. Each object is listed in chronological order of its discovery (multiple dates occur when the moments of imaging, observation, and publication differ), identified through its various designations (including temporary and permanent schemes), and the ...
Instead, Pluto and Charon likely remained much the same after they collided, spinning together to form an object shaped like a cosmic snowman before separating into the binary system they have ...
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The decision to name the object Pluto was intended in part to honour Percival Lowell, as his initials made up the word's first two letters. [30] After discovering Pluto, Tombaugh continued to search the ecliptic for other distant objects. He found hundreds of variable stars and asteroids, as well as two comets, but no further planets. [31]
The models consist of numeric representations of positions, velocities and accelerations of major Solar System bodies, tabulated at equally spaced intervals of time, covering a specified span of years. [1] Barycentric rectangular coordinates of the Sun, eight major planets and Pluto, and geocentric coordinates of the Moon are tabulated.
The two dots on top of the x position vectors denote their second derivative with respect to time, or their acceleration vectors. Adding and subtracting these two equations decouples them into two one-body problems, which can be solved independently. Adding equations (1) and results in an equation describing the center of mass motion.