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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.
Like Pluto, its orbit is highly eccentric, with a perihelion of 38.2 AU (roughly Pluto's distance from the Sun) and an aphelion of 97.6 AU, and steeply inclined to the ecliptic plane at an angle of 44°. [220] Gonggong (33.8–101.2 AU) is a dwarf planet in a comparable orbit to Eris, except that it is in a 3:10 resonance with Neptune.
Arctic, diurnal, and tropical zones of Pluto; oscillation of the zones in response to the obliquity cycle is displayed by dashed lines [1]. The tropics of Pluto are defined as the latitude ranges in which the Sun reaches its overhead point, or zenith, at least once during Pluto's orbital period around the Sun.
DE440 and DE441 were published in 2021, with improvements in the orbits of Jupiter, Saturn and Pluto from more recent spacecraft observations. [7] JPL ephemerides have been the basis of the ephemerides of sun, moon and planets in the Astronomical Almanac since the volumes for 1984 through 2002, which used JPL's ephemeris DE200.
A barycentric reference frame measures the asteroid's orbit relative to the gravitational center of the entire Solar System, rather than just the Sun. Mostly due to the influence of the outer gas giants, the Solar System barycenter varies by up to twice the radius of the Sun. This difference in position can lead to significant changes in the ...
One particularly distant body is 90377 Sedna, which was discovered in November 2003.It has an extremely eccentric orbit that takes it to an aphelion of 937 AU. [2] It takes over 10,000 years to orbit, and during the next 50 years it will slowly move closer to the Sun as it comes to perihelion at a distance of 76 AU from the Sun. [3] Sedna is the largest known sednoid, a class of objects that ...
It takes approximately 248 years for Pluto to complete its orbit around the sun, with its journey in each zodiac sign varying due to its elliptical orbit. Nevertheless, as Pluto transits each sign ...
If Jupiter had Mercury's orbit (57,900,000 km, 0.387 AU), the Sun–Jupiter barycenter would be approximately 55,000 km from the center of the Sun ( r 1 / R 1 ≈ 0.08). But even if the Earth had Eris's orbit (1.02 × 10 10 km, 68 AU), the Sun–Earth barycenter would still be within the Sun (just over 30,000 km from the center).