Pluto(NOTAPLANETANYMORE)

Welcome to my Pluto page(No not Mickey Mouse's Dog). Pluto is about 39 times as far from the sun as Earth is. Its average distance from the sun is about 3,647,240,000 miles. Pluto travels around the sun in an elliptical orbit. At some point in its orbit, it comes closer to the sun than Neptune, the outermost planet. It stays inside Neptune's orbit for about 20 Earth years. This event occurs every 248 Earth years, which is about the same number of Earth years it takes Pluto to travel once around the sun. Pluto entered Neptune's orbit on Jan. 23, 1979, and remained there until Feb. 11, 1999. As it orbits the sun, Pluto spins on its axis, an imaginary line through its center. It spins around once in about six Earth days. Scientists and Astronomers know little about Pluto because it is so far from Earth. Pluto's surface is one of the coldest places in our solar system. Astronomers believe the temperature on Pluto may be about –375 °F. In 1978, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory substation in Flagstaff detected a satellite of Pluto. They named it Charon. This satellite has a diameter of about 750 miles. In 1996, astronomers published the first detailed images of Pluto's surface. The images, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, show about 12 large bright or dark areas. The bright regions, which include polar caps, are probably frozen nitrogen. The dark areas may be methane frost that has been broken down chemically by ultraviolet radiation from the sun. In 2005, a team of astronomers studying images from the Hubble Space Telescope discovered two previously unknown moons of Pluto. The satellites, later named Hydra and Nix, had diameters of up to 100 miles and lay well outside the orbit of Charon. In 2006, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration launched the New Horizons probe. The probe was expected to fly by Pluto in 2015.

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