Why was Pluto reclassified as a dwarf planet? One might think that it’s purely a matter of size. Mercury, the smallest of the ...

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Here's how Pluto won - and lost - its planetary ...

Back in 2006 our Solar System lost a planet, not because it disappeared, but because it was reclassified. Pluto, now considered a dwarf planet, failed one of the three tests the International ...

Pluto fails the third criterion because its orbit overlaps with objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies beyond Neptune. So, a new class of celestial object — the dwarf planet — came ...

“New Horizons shattered a major paradigm of planetary science,” says Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “Pluto turns out to have as much complexity as Mars or Earth, so much so that I ...

The resolution demoted Pluto from its status as the ninth and outermost planet of the solar system to that of a dwarf planet. After decades of being called a planet — the ninth and most distant ...

Today NASA said that the Dawn spacecraft has fallen out of contact with Earth, presumably because it’s run out of the thruster… Read More The once-mysterious bright spots shining on the surface of the ...

That's not just because it's too far away. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAS) reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. That decision came several years after discovering the Kuiper ...

The first time you may have heard the term ‘dwarf planet’ was when Pluto got demoted to one in 2006 (RIP). However, we actually have six in our Solar System. Pluto, Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris ...

Pluto meets the first two criteria but failed the third, losing its planetary status bu joining the newly created ranks of "dwarf planets". It will complete the first orbit since its 1930 ...