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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 ...
[2] Pluto is so small and so remote from the Sun and the Earth that it was not discovered until 1930. [3] It was classified as a planet at the time and remained as such for 76 years until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union reclassified it as a dwarf planet, as it belongs to a belt of many similar small objects. [4]
Charon, a moon of Pluto that was proposed as a dwarf planet by the IAU in 2006, is included for comparison. Those objects that have absolute magnitude greater than +1, and so meet the threshold of the joint planet–minor planet naming committee of the IAU, are highlighted, as is Ceres, which the IAU has assumed is a dwarf planet since they ...
Pluto (bottom left) compared in size to the Earth and the Moon. Pluto's diameter is 2 376.6 ± 3.2 km [5] and its mass is (1.303 ± 0.003) × 10 22 kg, 17.7% that of the Moon (0.22% that of Earth). [125] Its surface area is 1.774 443 × 10 7 km 2, or just slightly bigger than Russia or Antarctica (particularly including the Antarctic sea ice ...
For 76 years, Pluto was considered our solar system's ninth planet — so, what caused it to lose its status?
Pluto was considered a planet up until 2006, when researchers at the International Astronomical Union voted to "demote" it to dwarf planet.
On February 12, 2015, NASA released new images of Pluto (taken from January 25 to 31) from the approaching probe. [133] [134] New Horizons was more than 203 million km (126 million mi) away from Pluto when it began taking the photos, which showed Pluto and its largest moon, Charon. The exposure time was too short to see Pluto's smaller, much ...
New Horizons has provided scientists with a new surprise: Pluto has a tail.