The controversy endures over Pluto's true status ... to get off the farm in Kansas where he spent his days working the earth. At just 23 years old, Tombaugh sent his drawings, unsolicited ...

Pluto was always in a tough spot when it came to being a planet. Just 1,477 miles across, it's only one-fifth the diameter of Earth. It did have five known moons: Charon, Nix, Hydra, Kerberos and ...

But Pluto and Charon are different from Earth and the Moon, too – they are both smaller (the Moon is 3,475 kilometers across) and much, much colder, made up of rock and ice. When the researchers ...

“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 ...

Unlike how scientists believe Earth's moon formed billions of years ago, Pluto and its biggest moon, Charon, didn't have a messy breakup. New computer simulations show the primitive dwarf planet ...

Pluto did not meet all three criteria the IAU determined were necessary to be considered a planet: The body must orbit its host star, just as Earth and Jupiter orbit the sun. It is large enough to ...

The return trip to the Earth can take from 35 to 52 minutes, depending on whether we are on the same side of the Sun as Jupiter or on the other side. Little Pluto is so small and remote it was not ...

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 ...

Pluto was discovered at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1930 and was considered our ninth planet until 2006. The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet ...