Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Jamie Carter is an award-winning reporter who covers the night sky.

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 ...

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 ...

If a person with a mass of 55kgs was to travel to Jupiter or Pluto, the effects of gravity would be very different from those on Earth. Gravity is the pull that a planet exerts towards its centre.

not just about Pluto, but about the vast realm of icy bodies lurking beyond Neptune, relics of the earliest days of the solar system’s formation. Back on Earth, the planetary scientists who ...

One of the most memorable images taken by New Horizons is that of Pluto’s "heart" feature. The heart-shaped glacier, nicknamed Sputnik for Earth’s first human-made satellite, is nearly 600 ...

Still that date will be one to circle on cosmic calendars. It takes Pluto slightly over 248 Earth years to orbit the sun, ...