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Unlike other planets that have a more or less circular, equatorial orbit around the sun, Pluto’s is sharply inclined and highly elliptical, with a perihelion, or close approach to the sun, of ...
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 (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 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 ...
This is the primary reason it has a larger population than the other Neptunian resonances encountered in the Kuiper Belt. The cloud of low-inclination bodies beyond 40 AU is the cubewano family, while bodies with higher eccentricities (0.05 to 0.34) and semimajor axes close to the 3:2 Neptune resonance are primarily plutinos.
Pluto was, however, found to be too small to have disrupted the orbits of the outer planets, and its discovery was therefore coincidental. Like Ceres, it was initially considered to be a planet, but after the discovery of many other similarly sized objects in its vicinity it was reclassified in 2006 as a dwarf planet by the IAU. [22]
Before New Horizons started sending back data and close-up images of Pluto, we barely knew the dwarf planet. We were like a love-sick fool who could only observe from afar. Now, the New Horizons ...
However, acceptance of Eris as the tenth planet implicitly demanded a definition of planet that set Pluto as an arbitrary minimum size. Many astronomers, claiming that the definition of planet was of little scientific importance, preferred to recognise Pluto's historical identity as a planet by "grandfathering" it into the planet list. [47]