Where is Pluto Now?
Friends, the Kuiper Belt is a region of space just beyond our solar system, and the biggest object there is Pluto. Pluto is so far from the Sun that it receives less than 1% of sunlight, making it incredibly cold, with temperatures dropping below minus 200 degrees Celsius. That’s so cold it would freeze you instantly! This means Pluto is a place of darkness, freezing cold, and maybe even more mysteries that we will explore in today’s blog post.
For a long time, we have known there are eight planets in our solar system. If you search on Google, it will tell you the same. But what about Pluto? Where did it go? Is it not a planet anymore? Many people have asked these questions in the comments, so today we’ll answer them all.
Pluto was considered a planet for 76 years. When it was first discovered in 1930, it was declared the 9th planet in our solar system. But in 2006, scientists removed it from the list of planets and called it a “dwarf planet.” Some people might even call it an asteroid now. If you search for Pluto on Google today, it will show up as “Asteroid No. 134340.”
But why did this happen? To understand that, we need to go back to when Pluto was first discovered. The story begins in 1905 with a scientist named Percival Lowell, who believed there was another planet beyond Neptune, which he called “Planet X.” He thought this because something seemed to be affecting the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Unfortunately, Percival Lowell passed away before he could find this mysterious planet.
For 14 years after Lowell’s death, astronomers at his observatory continued to search for Planet X, but they couldn’t find it. Then, in 1929, a young astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh joined the observatory. Within just one year, Clyde Tombaugh did what no one else could: he discovered Planet X! He found it by carefully studying the stars to see if any of them were moving since planets move, but stars do not. In January 1930, he finally found a moving object, which turned out to be Pluto.
Naming Pluto wasn’t easy. Many names were suggested, like Coronus, Atlas, Erebus, Persephone, and Prometheus. But in the end, they chose the name “Pluto,” suggested by an 11-year-old girl named Venetia Burney. She picked “Pluto” because, in Roman mythology, Pluto is the god of the underworld, and the distant Kuiper Belt, where Pluto is found, seemed like an underworld too.
Now, for a long time, scientists thought Pluto was a big planet, maybe even as big as Uranus or Neptune. But over time, they discovered that Pluto is actually smaller than Earth and even smaller than our Moon! To give you an idea, if Earth were a giant ball, about 170 Plutos could fit inside it.
Pluto is also very far from the Sun—about 7.4 billion kilometers away, or 49 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. Because of this, even the most powerful telescopes, like the Hubble Telescope, struggled to capture clear images of Pluto. That’s why scientists decided to send a spacecraft called “New Horizons” to Pluto in 2006. It took New Horizons nine years to reach Pluto, but when it finally arrived in 2015, it sent back much clearer images.
So why isn’t Pluto considered a planet anymore? In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) created a new definition for what makes a planet. According to their rules, a planet must:
- Orbit the Sun.
- Be big enough for gravity to shape it into a round form.
- Not be a moon of another planet.
- Clear its path of other objects in its orbit.
Pluto meets the first three rules, but it doesn’t meet the fourth one. Pluto’s gravity isn’t strong enough to clear away other objects near its orbit. That’s why Pluto was reclassified as a “dwarf planet.”
Many people felt sad because they grew up learning about Pluto as the 9th planet. But now we understand that while Pluto isn’t a planet, it still has a fascinating story, full of mysteries to explore!
I hope this answers all your questions and helps you learn something new. Thanks for reading!
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