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Pluto is more than twice the diameter and a dozen times the mass of Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt. It is less massive than the dwarf planet Eris, a trans-Neptunian object discovered in 2005, though Pluto has a larger diameter of 2,376.6 km [5] compared to Eris's approximate diameter of 2,326 km. [126]
The innermost and largest moon, Charon, was discovered by James Christy on 22 June 1978, nearly half a century after Pluto was discovered. This led to a substantial revision in estimates of Pluto's size, which had previously assumed that the observed mass and reflected light of the system were all attributable to Pluto alone.
He discovered Pluto in 1930, the first object to be discovered in what would later be identified as the Kuiper belt. At the time of discovery, Pluto was considered the ninth planet, but was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006. Tombaugh also discovered many asteroids, and called for the serious scientific research of unidentified flying objects.
The first TNO to be discovered was Pluto in 1930. It became the namesake of a larger group of resonant objects called plutinos (another such resonant subgroup are the twotinos ). It took more than 60 years to discover a second TNO, Albion ( provisionally known as 1992 QB 1 ), in 1992.
NASA launched the New Horizon spacecraft in 2006 to learn more about the icy dwarf planet Pluto. Here are some of the first photos from that mission, taken from between 125 and 115 million miles away.
On 20 March 2015, NASA invited the general public to suggest names for surface features that will be discovered on Pluto and Charon. [26] On 15 April 2015, Pluto was imaged showing a possible polar cap. [27] Between April and June 2015, New Horizons began returning images of Pluto that exceeded the quality that the Hubble Space Telescope could ...
Pluto likely acquired large moon Charon in a “kiss and capture” collision billions of years ago. It may have created a subsurface ocean on the icy dwarf planet.
Below is a list of the smallest exoplanets so far discovered, in terms of physical size ... Shown for comparison: Pluto: 0.1863 Shown for comparison: Moon: 0.2725 ...