| Pluto |
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| A picture of Pluto and Charon taken by the HTS |
| Pluto is the smallest planet and the farthest from the sun. It was named after the Roman god of the dead. Pluto is one of the two planets you need a telescope to see it. It's average distance from the sun is 5.9 billion km, that's 39 times farther then Earth. An air- plane traveling at 1, 810km/h would take 370 years to reach Pluto. Did you know Pluto's real colour is a yellowish-brown? Well it is! For many years very little was known about this planet. Still not a whole lot is. Some astronomer’s think Pluto and Charon are something from the Kuiper belt and are not a planet and moon. Scientist doubt there is any life on Pluto. |
| Pluto's orbit is VERY elliptical (oval). Its orbit is kind of shaped like an egg. To make one full rotation around the sun it takes Pluto 247 years! Wow that's a long time. Twenty of those years are spent in side Neptune's orbit. Pluto went in to Neptune’s orbit in 1979 and it came out in 1999. It takes six days for Pluto to spin around once on its axis. |
| Pluto's surface is mainly ice. When it gets closer to the sun, some of that ice melts and Pluto has a thin atmosphere. Very little is known about it though. The atmosphere probably contains methane, nitrogen and carbon monoxide. Very much like Triton's. Pluto is one of the coldest places in the solar system (no duh!). The temperature there is -233 degrees Celsius! |
| Pluto has only one moon, Charon. It takes six days to travel around Pluto. Charon was discovered in 1978, 19 000km away from Pluto. Its diameter is 1, 270 km, that makes Pluto and Charon the planet-moon closes in size! A record once held by Earth and its moon. Something cool about Charon is that is named after the mythological creature that ferried the dead to "Pluto". |
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| Pluto dosen't have rings. |
| Using mathematics discovered Pluto. In 1905 Percival Lowell found that the force of some unknown planet was disturbing Uranus's and Neptune's orbit. In 1915 he had predicted the planets location. Unfortunately, he died in 1916 with out finding it. Clyde W. (a person at the observatory Lowell had worked at) used his calculations. He used a bigger telescope then what Lowell had used. In 1930 he found Pluto. It was named after the Roman god of the dead to honour Lowell, and since Pluto was so far away from the sun it was probably very dark. After the discovery though it was determined that Pluto was way too small to be the planet which was affecting Uranus's and Neptune's orbit. The search for Planet X continues. |
| A spacecraft has ever visited Pluto. In fact, it is the only planet not to have been. Even the HTS can only show major features on the planet. NASA is manufacturing a mission. They plan to launch in 2010 or later. As you probably know it is not cheap to make a spacecraft and send it into space! |
| As I said before Pluto is the smallest planet. It's diameter is only 2, 300km wide! That's less then a fifth of Earth! Think of Pluto as the head of a pin, Earth as a curnel of popcorn and the Sun as a soccer ball. On this scale "Earth" would be 22 meters away from the "Sun". But Pluto would be 863 meters away! That’s over eight soccer fields! |
| A strange thing about Pluto is that a few months after Pluto the planet was discovered, the Walt Disney Character Pluto was created. Isn't that funny? |
| A picture of what we think Pluto surface would look like. Charom is in the background |
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