What Exactly is Pluto?

Pluto is one of the most mysterious and controversial celestial objects in the solar system. Pluto is a complex and mysterious world with mountains, valleys, plains, craters, and maybe glaciers. Discovered in 1930, Pluto was long considered our solar system’s ninth planet. But after the discovery of similar intriguing worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt, icy Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet. Pluto is orbited by five known moons, the largest of which is Charon. Charon is about half the size of Pluto itself, making it the largest satellite relative to the planet it orbits in our solar system. Pluto and Charon are often referred to as a double planet.  Pluto’s four other moons are named Kerberos, Styx, Nix and Hydra.

Some facts about Pluto

The name of Pluto was suggested by an 11 years old girl named Venetia Burney. When her grandfather told her the news that they have founded a new planet, then she said that Why not we can put its name Pluto under the name of the Roman Gods.

Pluto is very, very cold. It is much colder than Antarctica. It is so cold that Earth’s air would freeze into a kind of snow there. Pluto has less gravity than Earth. This means a person would weigh much less on Pluto than on Earth. It is so distant that the Sun’s light, which travels about 300,000 km per second, takes more than five hours to reach it. An observer standing on Pluto’s surface would see the Sun as an extremely bright star in the dark sky, providing Pluto on average 1/1,600 of the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth. Pluto’s surface temperature therefore is so cold that common gases such as nitrogen and carbon monoxide exist there as ices. Pluto is one third water, it is in the form of water ice which is more than 3 times as much water as in all the Earth’s oceans, the remaining two thirds are rock. Pluto’s surface is covered with ices, and has several mountain ranges, light and dark regions, and a scattering of craters.

Why Pluto is known as a dwarf planet

Pluto is a dwarf planet because it has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Pluto goes around the sun, it’s round enough, it’s got moons, and behaves like a planet, but the idea is that Pluto did not form the same way as the rest of the planets. Pluto’s orbit is both eccentric and inclined more than the rest of the planets by about 17 degrees. That’s suggests something is different about this object.

Comparison with the other planets of solar system

Compared with the planets, Pluto is also anomalous in its physical characteristics. Pluto has a radius less than half that of Mercury; it is only about two-thirds the size of Earth’s Moon. Next to the outer planets—the giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune—it is strikingly tiny. When these characteristics are combined with what is known about its density and composition, Pluto appears to have more in common with the large icy moons of the outer planets than with any of the planets themselves. Its closest twin is Neptune’s moon Triton, which suggests a similar origin for these two bodies (see below Origin of Pluto and its moons).