Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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, a dwarf planet that typically orbits outside Neptune, is vastly small in comparison to Jupiter, and much farther away. The Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect was a hoax phenomenon purported to cause a noticeable short-term reduction in gravity on Earth that was invented for April Fools' Day by the English astronomer Patrick Moore ...
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.
New Horizons captured its first (distant) images of Pluto in late September 2006, during a test of the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager. [24] The images, taken from a distance of approximately 4.2 billion kilometers, confirmed the spacecraft's ability to track distant targets, critical for maneuvering toward Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects.
New Horizons has provided scientists with a new surprise: Pluto has a tail.