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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.
The total mass of the asteroid belt is significantly less than Pluto's, and roughly twice that of Pluto's moon Charon. The asteroid belt is a torus-shaped region in the Solar System, centered on the Sun and roughly spanning the space between the orbits of the planets Jupiter and Mars.
The asteroid and comet belts orbit the Sun from the inner rocky planets into outer parts of the Solar System, interstellar space. [ 16 ] [ 17 ] [ 18 ] An astronomical unit , or AU, is the distance from Earth to the Sun, which is approximately 150 billion meters (93 million miles). [ 19 ]
[39] [40] Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies (remnants from the Solar System's formation) and at least one dwarf planet—Pluto, which may be geologically active. [41] But while the asteroid belt is composed primarily of rock and metal, the Kuiper belt is composed largely of ices, such as methane, ammonia, and water.
NASA has released the 'first and best' images the New Horizons spacecraft was able to take of Pluto during its flyby of the dwarf planet in July.
The catalog's first object is 1 Ceres, discovered by Giuseppe Piazzi in 1801, while its best-known entry is Pluto, listed as 134340 Pluto. The vast majority (97.3%) of minor planets are asteroids from the asteroid belt (the catalog uses a color code to indicate a body's dynamical classification).
"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 ...
The Kuiper belt (/ ˈ k aɪ p ər / ⓘ KY-pər) [1] is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. [2] It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive.