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Five known moons of Pluto to scale. Pluto has five known natural satellites. The largest and closest to Pluto is Charon. First identified in 1978 by astronomer James Christy, Charon is the only moon of Pluto that may be in hydrostatic equilibrium. Charon's mass is sufficient to cause the barycenter of the Pluto–Charon system to be outside Pluto.
Pluto (29.7–49.3 AU) is the largest known object in the Kuiper belt. Pluto has a relatively eccentric orbit, inclined 17 degrees to the ecliptic plane. Pluto has a 2:3 resonance with Neptune, meaning that Pluto orbits twice around the Sun for every three Neptunian orbits.
The models consist of numeric representations of positions, velocities and accelerations of major Solar System bodies, tabulated at equally spaced intervals of time, covering a specified span of years. [1] Barycentric rectangular coordinates of the Sun, eight major planets and Pluto, and geocentric coordinates of the Moon are tabulated.
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.
The Titius–Bode law predicts planets will be present at specific distances in astronomical units, which can be compared to the observed data for the planets and two dwarf planets in the Solar System: Graphical plot of the eight planets, Pluto, and Ceres versus the first ten predicted distances.
There are at least 19 natural satellites in the Solar System that are known to be massive enough to be close to hydrostatic equilibrium: seven of Saturn, five of Uranus, four of Jupiter, and one each of Earth, Neptune, and Pluto. Alan Stern calls these satellite planets, although the term major moon is more common.
The eight planets of the Solar System with size to scale (up to down, left to right): Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune (outer planets), Earth, Venus, Mars, and Mercury (inner planets) A planet is a large, rounded astronomical body that is generally required to be in orbit around a star , stellar remnant , or brown dwarf , and is not one itself ...
The diameter of this colossal disk is roughly 3,300 times the distance between Earth and the sun, with enough gas and dust to form super-sized planets in far-flung orbits, the U.S. and German ...