New Horizons's closest approach to Pluto and Haron

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Pluto was discovered in 1930 by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh -who declared that he had discovered Planet X, and was considered as a plante untill 2006. So what happened and Pluto is not a planet anymore?                                                                                                  


Pluto belongs to Kuiper Belt, a region of the Solar System beyond the Planets. When astronomers started to explore Kuiper Belt, they supposed that Pluto can't be the biggest planet, since according to their estimations Kuiper Belt has at least 70.000 icy objects with the same composition as Pluto. So it was a matter of time to be found such an object with the same size as Pluto. In 2003 this object finally made its appearance and named from UB313 to Eris. So at this time astronomers wondered: 'What is Eris? A Planet or an object in Kuiper Belt? What if we 'll discover more Planets in this size in few years?' The idea of a 9-Planet Solar Sustem began to fall apart, and thats why they reached to a redefinition of a "Planet".

In August 2006 International Astronomical Union decided that an object is a Planet if meets these three requirements:




  • It needs to be in orbit around the Sun – Yes, so Pluto might be a planet.
  • It needs to have enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape – Sure it is!
  • It needs to have “cleared the neighborhood” of its orbit – And here is the problem for Pluto.
    And that's how we get a "dwarf Planet".

    What about Pluto's details?
    Firsly, Pluto was named by an 11 years old girl from England-and on the photo below you can see once again the power of child's fiction.
                                   
    "Pluto is only 1,400 miles (2,300 kilometers) wide. That's about half the width of the United States. Pluto is slightly smaller than Earth's moon. It takes Pluto 248 years to go around the sun. One day on Pluto is about 6 1/2 days on Earth.The dwarf planet has three moons. Its largest moon is named Charon (KER-ən). Charon is about half the size of Pluto.
    Pluto's two other moons are named Nix and Hydra. They were discovered in 2005. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope took pictures of the two new moons. Nix and Hydra are very small. The moons are less than 100 miles (160 kilometers) wide.

    In 2006, NASA launched the first mission to Pluto. It is called New Horizons. New Horizons is a spacecraft that is going to the edge of the solar system. The spacecraft is about the size of a piano. It will take nine years to reach Pluto.New Horizons has cameras that will take pictures of Pluto. The spacecraft also has science tools to gather information about Pluto. These pictures and information will help scientists learn more about the dwarf planet.

    On 14 July 2015 New Horizons gave us the closest photos of Pluto and the possibility to compare it with its moon Charon.
                           
    “These images show that Pluto and Charon are truly complex worlds.  There's a whole lot going on here,” said New Horizons co-investigator Will Grundy, Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona.  “Our surface composition team is working as fast as we can to identify the substances in different regions on Pluto and unravel the processes that put them where they are.”
    From the colour scientist understand the molecular make up of ices in the surface of Pluto and Charon, and the age of geologic features like craters. If Pluto disappeared, it certainly wouldn't have an effect on Earth. Gravity depends on mass, and the force it exerts decreases over distance. So Pluto is too tiny and too far to affect Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus or Neptune."



    @ Nasa, 2015 - Wired

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