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Geology of Pluto. The geology of Pluto consists of the characteristics of the surface, crust, and interior of Pluto. Because of Pluto's distance from Earth, in-depth study from Earth is difficult. Many details about Pluto remained unknown until 14 July 2015, when New Horizons flew through the Pluto system and began transmitting data back to ...
Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most- massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive than Eris.
Pluto may be defined as having retrograde rotation and an axial tilt of 60 degrees, or prograde rotation and a tilt of 120 degrees. Following the latter convention (the right-hand rule), the hemisphere currently in daylight is the northern one, with much of the southern hemisphere in darkness.
[39] [40] Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies (remnants from the Solar System's formation) and at least one dwarf planet—Pluto, which may be geologically active. [41] But while the asteroid belt is composed primarily of rock and metal, the Kuiper belt is composed largely of ices, such as methane, ammonia, and water.
A dwarf planet is a small planetary-mass object that is in direct orbit around the Sun, massive enough to be gravitationally rounded, but insufficient to achieve orbital dominance like the eight classical planets of the Solar System. The prototypical dwarf planet is Pluto, which for decades was regarded as a planet before the "dwarf" concept ...
Volcanism on Io, a moon of Jupiter, is represented by the presence of volcanoes, volcanic pits and lava flows on the surface. Io 's volcanic activity was discovered in 1979 by Linda Morabito, an imaging scientist working on Voyager 1. [1] Observations of Io by passing spacecraft and Earth-based astronomers have revealed more than 150 active ...
A natural satellite is, in the most common usage, an astronomical body that orbits a planet, dwarf planet, or small Solar System body (or sometimes another natural satellite). Natural satellites are colloquially referred to as moons, a derivation from the Moon of Earth. In the Solar System, there are six planetary satellite systems containing ...
The climate of Pluto concerns the atmospheric dynamics, weather, and long-term trends on the dwarf planet Pluto. Five climate zones are assigned on the dwarf planet: tropics, arctic, tropical arctic, diurnal, and polar. [1] These climate zones are delineated based on astronomically defined boundaries or sub-solar latitudes, which are not ...