Pluto Day 2024

The Ex-Planet Pluto was discovered February 18 1930 by 24-yo Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Initially hailed as the ninth planet, it was reclassified in 2006 as "dwarf planet", sparking widespread debate. Pluto was named by an 11-yo girl from Oxford, England, named Venetia Burney. After learning of the discovery, she suggested the name Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, to her grandfather. The name was passed to Lowell via the University of Oxford, voted, and adopted. Pluto orbits the Sun every 248 Earth years, and its highly elliptical orbit takes it closer to the Sun than Neptune for about 20 years. It has five known moons: Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, with Charon being the largest and so closely bound gravitationally to Pluto that they are often referred to as a double planet system. The flyby of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft in July 2015 revealed a varied landscape, including mountains made of water ice, vast plains of nitrogen ice, and a blue atmospheric haze, challenging previous assumptions about its geologically inactive status. Tombaugh Regio, Pluto's heart-shaped feature, spans 1,600 km and showcases a unique composition of nitrogen ice, methane, and carbon monoxide, Pluto's surface area is roughly equivalent to Russia's, the largest country on Earth, yet its exploration has only just begun, promising new discoveries about the solar system's frontier. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto Art&Text🫶by ChatGPT.