The controversy endures over Pluto's true status ... to get off the farm in Kansas where he spent his days working the earth. At just 23 years old, Tombaugh sent his drawings, unsolicited ...

In 2006, the year New Horizons was launched, Pluto vanished from the list of planets and reappeared as a “dwarf planet.” That, of course, had more to do with astronomers on Earth than any ...

Still that date will be one to circle on cosmic calendars. 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 ...

Pluto was always in a tough spot when it came to being a planet. Just 1,477 miles across, it's only one-fifth the diameter of Earth. It did have five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and ...

But Pluto and Charon are different from Earth and the Moon, too – they are both smaller (the Moon is 3,475 kilometers across) and much, much colder, made up of rock and ice. When the researchers ...

Pluto is too far away from Earth to be seen with the naked eye. If you stood on Pluto's surface, the Sun would merely appear to be a very bright star. Although previous images showed that ...

The return trip to the Earth can take from 35 to 52 minutes, depending on whether we are on the same side of the Sun as Jupiter or on the other side. Little Pluto is so small and remote it was not ...

Pluto is 40 times further from the sun than the earth, which causes its orbit to be sluggish; it requires 6.4 Earth days or 153.3 hours to complete one round. There are several documentaries on ...

not just about Pluto, but about the vast realm of icy bodies lurking beyond Neptune, relics of the earliest days of the solar system’s formation. Back on Earth, the planetary scientists who ...

If a person with a mass of 55kg was to travel to Jupiter or Pluto, the effects of gravity would be very different from those on Earth. Gravity is the pull that a planet exerts towards its centre.

“New Horizons shattered a major paradigm of planetary science,” says Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “Pluto turns out to have as much complexity as Mars or Earth, so much so that I ...