Many space enthusiasts feel sorry for Pluto: it was reclassified as a dwarf planet and even used as a verb—”to pluto” something is to devalue and downgrade it. But new evidence suggests Pluto isn’t so sad after all—it has a friend. The recently discovered planet, named RR245, is in the Kuiper Belt (a region beyond Neptune that’s populated by icy objects) and orbits the sun …
Nearly a decade ago, NASA launched its New Horizons spacecraft into space, tasked with exploring our vast solar system and sending information home. After over three billion miles of flight, it has finally reached its ultimate destination: Pluto. Until now, details of the controversial dwarf planet have only been speculative—often describing it as oblong and gray—but information from New Horizons’ up-close encounter tells a different …
Pluto is turning out be a weirder dwarf planet than expected. Not only is one of its moons almost as large as the planet itself, but its two other moons wobble through space. The Hubble Space Telescope has captured images of the oblong moons—Nix and Hydra—tumbling like two poorly thrown footballs as they orbit Pluto and Charon—the other massive moon. The wobbling is due to …
