“New Horizons shattered a major paradigm of planetary science,” says Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “Pluto turns out to have as much complexity as Mars or Earth, so much so that I ...

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Here's how Pluto won - and lost - its planetary ...

Pluto fails the third criterion because its orbit overlaps with objects in the ... that science tries to achieve by seeing ...

Pluto is too far away from Earth to be seen with the naked eye. If you stood on Pluto's surface, the Sun would merely appear to be a very bright star. Although previous images showed that ...

Carrying enough fuel to slow it into a Pluto-centric orbit would have added lots of weight and years of travel time; instead, it will zoom past, snapping photos as it goes. Pluto is the second ...

Pluto and Charon orbit a shared center of mass, much like figure skaters spinning together, a result of their unique collision process. The collision deposited internal heat into both bodies ...

The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet because it does not clear its orbit of other debris. Pluto was the little planet that could — until it couldn’t.