PLANETARY SYSTEM
OCTOBER 28, 2021
Scientific Facts Of Pluto
These are the scientific facts of Pluto :
- Pluto is the ninth largest and the tenth most massive known object directly orbiting the Sun.
- Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh on February 18, 1930 and was classified as a planet for 75 years.
- The name Pluto is from the Roman mythology, god of the underworld. Pluto was also the god of wealth.
- So far Pluto has five known moons : Charon, Nix, Kerberos, Styx and Hydra. Charon is the largest with a diameter over a half that of Pluto.
- In 2006, Pluto was reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet and it is the largest dwarf planet.
- According to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) Pluto is technically a dwarf planet because it has not “cleared its neighboring region of other objects”.
- The orbital period of Pluto is 248 Earth years. Meaning it completes orbiting the Sun every 248 years, compared to Earth’s orbital period which is 1 year.
- Temperature on Pluto range from minus 418 to minus 364 degrees Fahrenheit ( -250 to – 220 Celcius).
- With its ellipse orbital track, Pluto can get closer to the Sun than Neptune.
- The first spacecraft to visit the dwarf planet is New Horizons from NASA in July 2015. It took some pictures of the planet and gathered precious new information.
- Pluto probably consists of 70 percent rock and 30 percent water ice with a rocky core and a mantle of ice
- A big heart-shaped region on Pluto surface is called the Tombaugh Regio. It was discovered from the New Horizons flyby mission in 2015.
- Pluto is still pretty massive despite its status as a dwarf planet. The gravity on Pluto is 6 percent as strong as Earth’s gravity.
- Since Pluto is very far from the Sun, the Sun would look much dimmer and smaller from Pluto. It would look like a very bright star and the sunshine would light up the planet about as much as 264 times brighter than the full Moon lights up Earth at night.
- One day in Pluto is equal to 6,4 Earth days or 153,3 hours long. This happens since Pluto rotates much more slower than Earth.
- The name “Pluto” was suggested by Venetia Burney (1918 – 2009) an 11 year old girl from Oxford, England. Tombaugh and his colleagues voted for the name on May 24 and was officially christened the unnamed planet to Pluto.
- The distance of Pluto from the Sun is 39.5 Astronomical Units (AU) on average. But due to its elliptical orbit, the dwarf planet is not the same distance from the sun all the time. Its closest point to the Sun is 29.7 AU.
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