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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.
So far, it is the only KBO besides Pluto and its satellites to be visited by a spacecraft. On 15 October 2014, it was revealed that Hubble had uncovered three potential targets, provisionally designated PT1 ("potential target 1"), PT2 and PT3 by the New Horizons team.
The search for these led to the discovery of Pluto in February 1930, which was too small to explain the discrepancies. Revised estimates of Neptune's mass from the Voyager 2 flyby in 1989 showed that the problem was spurious. [9] Pluto was easiest to find because it has the highest apparent magnitude of all known
NASA has released the 'first and best' images the New Horizons spacecraft was able to take of Pluto during its flyby of the dwarf planet in July.
[6] [a] Charon and Pluto are also tidally locked, so that they always present the same face toward each other. The IAU General Assembly in August 2006 considered a proposal that Pluto and Charon be reclassified as a double planet, but the proposal was abandoned. [7] Like Pluto, Charon is a perfect sphere to within measurement uncertainty. [8]
"Pluto is the first planetary body we know of where the atmospheric energy budget is dominated by solid-phase haze particles instead of by gases." Pluto is way cooler than it should be, and now we ...
"The debate over Pluto’s status highlights the evolving nature of scientific classification."
They determined Pluto's mass to be 1.31×10 22 kg; roughly one five-hundredth that of Earth or one-sixth that of the Moon, and far too small to account for the observed discrepancies in the orbits of the outer planets. Lowell's prediction had been a coincidence: If there was a Planet X, it was not Pluto.