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Pluto has a moderately eccentric and inclined orbit, ranging from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometres; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun. Light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto at its orbital distance of 39.5 AU (5.91 billion km; 3.67 billion mi).
In astronomy, the plutinos are a dynamical group of trans-Neptunian objects that orbit in 2:3 mean-motion resonance with Neptune. This means that for every two orbits a plutino makes, Neptune orbits three times. The dwarf planet Pluto is the largest member as well as the namesake of this group.
This is the defining limit of a dwarf planet. [49] If an object is in hydrostatic equilibrium, a global layer of liquid on its surface would form a surface of the same shape as the body, apart from small-scale surface features such as craters and fissures. The body will have a spherical shape if it does not rotate and an ellipsoidal one if it does.
One particularly distant body is 90377 Sedna, which was discovered in November 2003.It has an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it to an aphelion of 937 AU. [2] It takes over 10,000 years to orbit, and during the next 50 years it will slowly move closer to the Sun as it comes to perihelion at a distance of 76 AU from the Sun. [3] Sedna is the largest known sednoid, a class of objects that ...
Pluto belongs to a group of objects that distantly orbit the sun called the Kuiper Belt, where thousands of icy remnants left over from the formation of the solar system linger. Eight of the 10 ...
Pluto needs 248 years for one complete orbit, and has been observed for less than one third of that time. It has an average distance of 39 AU from the Sun, hence in-depth data from Pluto is sparse and difficult to gather. Temperature is inferred indirectly for Pluto; when it passes in front of a star, observers note how fast the light drops off.
Webb for the first time detected carbon dioxide and hydrogen peroxide - both frozen as solids - on the surface of Charon, a spherical body about 750 miles (1,200 km) in diameter, researchers said ...
Transits occur when one of Pluto's moons passes between Pluto and the Sun. This occurs when one of the satellites' orbital nodes (the points where their orbits cross Pluto's ecliptic) lines up with Pluto and the Sun. This can only occur at two points in Pluto's orbit; coincidentally, these points are near Pluto's perihelion and aphelion.