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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.
Vesta (radius 262.7 ± 0.1 km), the second-largest asteroid, appears to have a differentiated interior and therefore likely was once a dwarf planet, but it is no longer very round today. [74] Pallas (radius 255.5 ± 2 km ), the third-largest asteroid, appears never to have completed differentiation and likewise has an irregular shape.
By 1989, all eight planets have been visited by space probes. [297] Probes have returned samples from comets [298] and asteroids, [299] as well as flown through the Sun's corona [300] and visited two dwarf planets (Pluto and Ceres).
Neptune-crossing minor planets; Non-trojan minor planets. Centaurs; Damocloids; Trans-Neptunian objects (beyond the orbit of Neptune) Kuiper-belt objects (KBOs) Plutinos. Orcus, a dwarf planet. Vanth; Pluto, a dwarf planet. Complete list of Pluto's natural satellites. Charon; Twotinos; Cubewanos (classical objects) Haumea, a dwarf planet ...
There are eight planets within the Solar System; planets outside of the solar system are also known as exoplanets. Artist's concept of the potentially habitable exoplanet Kepler-186f. As of 24 January 2025, there are 5,830 confirmed exoplanets in 4,354 planetary systems, with 976 systems having more than one planet. [1]
A total of five planets are going retrograde between May and September: Mercury, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. "Retrograde" is a term used to describe when a planet's orbit appears to slow.
In effect, each orbits the other, forming a binary system informally referred to as a double-dwarf-planet. Pluto's four other moons, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and Styx are far smaller and orbit the Pluto–Charon system. [5] Among the other dwarf planets, Ceres has no known moons. It is 90 percent certain that Ceres has no moons larger than 1 km in ...
First spotted in 2016, the disk around a star 1,000 light-years away was not confirmed to be a hotbed for new, emerging planets until recent obs Astronomers find the biggest known batch of planet ...