7 Amazing facts about Pluto, explore!

Here are some facts about Pluto that are not much recognised by the community, I was amazed and was sure you will be the same, let's get moving!

!The planet Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld. This was proposed by Venetia Burney an eleven-year-old schoolgirl from Oxford, England. In Greek mythology, he is known as Hades, ruler of the underworld. The planet was named after such a deity because it is very far away from the Sun, and thus in perpetual darkness.

! Pluto was discovered on February 18th, 1930 by the Lowell Observatory.

For the 76 years between Pluto being discovered and the time it was reclassified as a dwarf planet, it completed under a third of its orbit around the Sun.

! Pluto has five known moons.

The moons are Charon (discovered in 1978,), Hydra and Nix (both discovered in 2005), Kerberos originally P4 (discovered 2011) and Styx originally P5 (discovered 2012) official designations S/2011 (134340) 1 and  S/2012 (134340) 1.

! Pluto is one-third water.

This is in the form of water ice which is more than 3 times as much water as in all the Earth’s oceans, the remaining two-thirds are rock. Pluto’s surface is covered with ices and has several mountain ranges, light and dark regions, and a scattering of craters.

! Pluto has been visited by one spacecraft.

The New Horizons spacecraft, which was launched in 2006, flew by Pluto on the 14th of July 2015 and took a series of images and other measurements. New Horizons is now on its way to the Kuiper Belt to explore even more distant objects.

! Pluto’s location was predicted by Percival Lowell in 1915.

The prediction came from deviations he initially observed in 1905 in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune.

! Pluto sometimes has an atmosphere.

When Pluto elliptical orbit takes it closer to the Sun, its surface ice thaws and forms a thin atmosphere primarily of nitrogen which slowly escapes the planet. It also has a methane haze that overs about 161 kilometres above the surface. The methane is dissociated by sunlight into hydrocarbons that fall to the surface and coat the ice with a dark covering. When Pluto travels away from the Sun the atmosphere then freezes back to its solid-state.

Here we come to an end of these 7 facts about pluto, we really await your comments, let's explore!

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