When was pluto found

Pluto is very small, only about half the width of the United States and its biggest moon Charon is about half the size of Pluto. Almost all the planets travel around the Sun in nearly perfect circles. But not Pluto. It takes an oval-shaped path with the Sun nowhere near its center. What's more, its path is quite tilted compared to the planets. Natural Color. Pluto is officially classified as a dwarf planet. Majestic Mountains and Frozen Plains. Kid-Friendly Pluto Pluto is a dwarf planet that lies in the Kuiper Belt, an area full of icy bodies and other dwarf planets out past Neptune.

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In , Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, a change widely thought of as a demotion. The question of Pluto's planet status has attracted controversy and stirred debate in the scientific community, and among the general public, since then. In , a science group including members of the New Horizon mission proposed a new definition of planethood based on "round objects in space smaller than stars," which would make the number of planets in our solar system expand from 8 to roughly American astronomer Percival Lowell first caught hints of Pluto's existence in from odd deviations he observed in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus , suggesting that another world's gravity was tugging at these two planets from beyond.

Lowell predicted the mystery planet's location in , but died without finding it. Pluto was finally discovered in by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory , based on predictions by Lowell and other astronomers.

Pluto got its name from year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England, who suggested to her grandfather that the new world get its name from the Roman god of the underworld. Her grandfather then passed the name on to Lowell Observatory. The name also honors Percival Lowell, whose initials are the first two letters of Pluto. Since Pluto is so far from Earth , little was known about the dwarf planet's size or surface conditions until , when NASA's New Horizons space probe made a close flyby of Pluto.

New Horizons showed that Pluto has a diameter of 1, miles 2, km , less than one-fifth the diameter of Earth, and only about two-thirds as wide as Earth's moon. Observations of Pluto's surface by the New Horizons spacecraft revealed a variety of surface features , including mountains that reach as high as 11, feet 3, meters , comparable to the Rocky Mountains on Earth.

While methane and nitrogen ice cover much of the surface of Pluto, these materials are not strong enough to support such enormous peaks, so scientists suspect that the mountains are formed on a bedrock of water ice. Pluto's surface is also covered in an abundance of methane ice, but New Horizons scientists have observed significant differences in the way the ice reflects light across the dwarf planet's surface.

The dwarf planet also possesses ice ridge terrain that appears to look like a snakeskin; astronomers spotted similar features to Earth's penitentes, or erosion-formed features on mountainous terrain.

The Pluto features are much larger; they are estimated at 1, feet m tall, while the Earth features are only a few meters in size. Another distinct feature on Pluto's surface is a large heart-shaped region known unofficially as Tombaugh Regio after Clyde Tombaugh; regio is Latin for region. The left side of the region an area that takes on the shape of an ice cream cone is covered in carbon monoxide ice. Other variations in the composition of surface materials have been identified within the "heart" of Pluto.

In the center left of Tombaugh Regio is a very smooth region unofficially known by the New Horizons team as "Sputnik Planum," after Earth's first artificial satellite, Sputnik. This region of Pluto's surface lacks craters caused by meteorite impacts, suggesting that the area is, on a geologic timescale, very young — no more than million years old. It's possible that this region is still being shaped and changed by geologic processes. These icy plains also display dark streaks that are a few miles long, and aligned in the same direction.

However, in , using the calculations of Lowell and W. Pickering as a guide, the search for Pluto was resumed at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. On February 18, , Tombaugh discovered the tiny, distant planet by use of a new astronomic technique of photographic plates combined with a blink microscope. With a surface temperature estimated at approximately Fahrenheit, Pluto was appropriately given the Roman name for the god of the underworld in Greek mythology.

It also has the most elliptical and tilted orbit of any planet, and at its closest point to the sun it passes inside the orbit of Neptune, the eighth planet. After its discovery, some astronomers questioned whether Pluto had sufficient mass to affect the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! On February 18, , Shani Davis becomes the first Black athlete to win an individual gold medal in Winter Olympics history, capturing the men's 1,meter speedskating race.

The IAU said in a press release at the time that "the 'dwarf planet' Pluto is recognized as an important prototype of a new class of trans-Neptunian objects.

The IAU will set up a process to name these objects. The decision has not been without controversy. Regardless, the little world is still a dwarf planet today as far as the IAU is concerned. Below and some facts about what was once the ninth planet to orbit the sun.

Pluto was discovered in by astronomer Clyde W.