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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.
Neptune (red arc) completes one orbit around the Sun (centre) for every 164.79 orbits of Earth. The light blue dot represents Uranus. The average distance between Neptune and the Sun is 4.5 billion km (about 30.1 astronomical units (AU), the mean distance from the Earth to the Sun), and it completes an orbit on average every 164.79 years ...
This is a list of trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), which are minor planets in the Solar System that orbit the Sun at a greater distance on average than Neptune, that is, their orbit has a semi-major axis greater than 30.1 astronomical units (AU). The Kuiper belt, scattered disk, and Oort cloud are three conventional divisions of this volume of ...
Seven are more massive than either Eris or Pluto. These larger moons are not physically distinct from the dwarf planets, but do not fit the IAU definition because they do not directly orbit the Sun. (Indeed, Neptune's moon Triton is a captured dwarf planet, and Ceres formed in the same region of the Solar System as the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.)
A total of five planets are going retrograde between May and September: Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. "Retrograde" is a term used to describe when a planet's orbit appears to slow.
Earth accretes or ejects near-Earth asteroids on million-year time scales, thereby clearing its orbit. Similarly, Pluto may cross the orbit of Neptune, but Neptune long ago locked Pluto and its attendant Kuiper belt objects, called plutinos, into a 3:2 resonance (i.e., they orbit the Sun twice for every three Neptune orbits). Since the orbits ...
In 2000, this object came closest to the Sun (perihelion) at 26.3 AU, [2] and has since moved away to a distance of 29.2 AU by the end of 2018. [7] This means that this small plutino is still well inside the orbit of Neptune which has a semi-major axis of 30.1 AU. Like Pluto, this plutino spends part of its orbit closer to the Sun than Neptune.
Trans-Neptunian objects, bodies at or beyond the orbit of Neptune, the outermost planet. The Kuiper belt, objects inside an apparent population drop-off approximately 55 AU from the Sun. Classical Kuiper belt objects like Makemake, also known as cubewanos, are in primordial, relatively circular orbits that are not in resonance with Neptune.