PLUTO Pluto is believed to be the last of nine planets in the solar system. Pluto is about 3,666 million miles (5,900 million kilometers) away from the Sun. It would take us 10 years to travel to Pluto from Earth in a spacecraft.
Pluto?s orbit is really weird. In 1979, Pluto moved in the orbit of its closest planet, leaving Neptune the farthest planet from the sun. Then in the year 1999 Pluto returned to the farthest planet from the sun.
In Roman Mythology Pluto is named after the god of the underworld (Greek: Hades). The planet Pluto is really small, and it is only two-thirds the size of the Earths moon. The planet Pluto is very dim, and is a truly dark and icy planet. The diameter of Pluto is around 1,800 miles and a mass of 0.002 of the earths mass, which would give Pluto a density less than water; 0.7
English: The Pluto-Charon system. Charon's orbit a...
Pluto and Charon as taken with the ESA/Dornier Fai...
Charon compared with Eris, Pluto, Makemake, Haumea...could be the value. The warmest temperature on Pluto is about ?350 degrees Fahrenheit (-175 degrees Celsius). A thin atmosphere of nitrogen covers Pluto. Most of the surface is covered by nitrogen and methane ice. There is water and ammonia ices, and there may be rock under the surface. This means that Pluto is a huge chunk of ice with frozen gasses.
It takes 248 years to go around the sun, so if you were 10 years old on earth you would be 0.04 on Pluto. You can jump extremely high on Pluto; if you weighed 100 pounds on earth you would weigh 6 pounds on Pluto.
Charon is named after the mythological figure that lead the dead across the River of Acheron into Hades (the underworld). Pluto only has one moon and is also the smallest planet to have a moon. Jim Christy at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered this moon, Charon, in 1978. They thought that Pluto was much larger, until they found out that Charon was Pluto?s moon. Charon is half the size of Pluto. Astronomers call Pluto-Charon a double-planet system. The weird thing about Charon is it seems to stand still. The reason is Pluto?s day takes the same amount of time as Charon?s orbit around the planet; both are just over 6 days.
Charon's discovery as a time-varying bulge on the ...
1990 photograph of Pluto and Charon. Taken by the ...
Satirical Protest and Counter-protest of Pluto ove...