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Dwarf planet


Pluto's status has been contested for many years as it is further away and considerably smaller than the eight other planets in our Solar System.

Since the early 1990s, astronomers have found several other objects of comparable size to Pluto in an outer region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.

Some astronomers have long argued that Pluto belongs with this population of small, icy "dwarf planets", not with the objects we call planets.

Allowances were once made for Pluto on account of its size. At just 2,360km (1,467 miles) across, Pluto is significantly smaller than the other planets. But until recently, it was still the biggest known object in the Kuiper Belt.

That changed with the discovery of 2003 UB313 by Professor Mike Brown and colleagues at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). After being measured with the Hubble Space Telescope, it was shown to be some 3,000km (1,864 miles) in diameter, making it larger than the ninth planet.

Named after the god of the underworld in NES ROMan mythology, it orbits the Sun at an average distance of 5.9 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) taking 247.9 Earth years to complete a single circuit of the Sun.

An unmanned US spacecraft, New Horizons, is due to fly by Pluto and the Kuiper Belt in 2015.






Wow...What do you think of this? Pretty crazy huh!

Well, that doesn't change my view. Everything out there expect small asteroids and stuff are planets for me.

What's weird about this is that my g/f told me about it. It was funny hearing hear talk about the news. Must be like that Seinfeld episode when George stops having sex and gets smarter. It's been awhile.

Whoa, maybe that is true. At first I didn't think my intelligence was improving, but then last night I beat Trojan for NES without dying once.

Holy hell I think I'm on to something. Maybe if I don't have sex for another couple weeks I'll be able to beat Solstice.

Is Solstice worth that?...

Pluto is a small asteroid. To put it in perspective, Pluto is smaller than the Moon. There are five other moons I can think of that are also bigger than Pluto...

Though, what we actually call it isn't important, I don't think. The astronomical history of Pluto is the important part.

Absolutely not. If it were up to me, we'd be bumpin' uglies.

Damn women. Can't live with 'em and can't kill 'em.

Damn women. Can't live with 'em and can't kill 'em.

Hey, that should be in quotation marks!