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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.
It takes Pluto slightly over 248 Earth years to orbit the sun, which means that on March 23, 2178, one Plutonian year will have elapsed since the dwarf planet was first spotted, on Feb. 18, 1930.
Composite exaggerated-color image of Pluto and its moon Charon.Separation not to scale 4 Vesta, an asteroid that was once a dwarf planet [4]. Starting in 1801, astronomers discovered Ceres and other bodies between Mars and Jupiter that for decades were considered to be planets.
[1] The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. [2] An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories. [3] These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.
It is about half the diameter and an eighth the mass of Pluto, a dwarf planet that resides in a frigid region of the outer Solar System called the Kuiper Belt, beyond the most distant planet ...
The definition of a planet has been a hot topic ever since a change kicked Pluto out of our planetary lineup in 2006. Now, a group of researchers is proposing a new definition yet again—one with ...
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 ...
Another question is why Mars came out so small compared with Earth. A study by Southwest Research Institute, San Antonio, Texas, published June 6, 2011 (called the Grand tack hypothesis), proposes that Jupiter had migrated inward to 1.5 AU. After Saturn formed, migrated inward, and established the 2:3 mean motion resonance with Jupiter, the ...