Earth has a newly-discovered neighbor in the solar system. But the heavenly body – possibly a dwarf planet à la Pluto – isn't a frequent visitor. Located beyond Neptune, its extreme orbit ...

Since Pluto is located so far from the sun, it takes around 248 Earth years for Pluto to orbit the sun. Pluto's orbit around the sun is not only a very long journey, it's also elliptical, resembling a ...

Pluto's largest moon, Charon, likely formed through a capture event in the early, crowded Kuiper Belt. Three-body encounters and tidal forces allowed Charon to lose energy and become permanently bound ...

Pluto, with its heart-shaped glacier, as captured by the New Horizons spacecraft Credit - JPL/NASA But Pluto has in many ways only grown in astronomers’ estimations. It is now known to be part of an ...

An amateur astronomer discovered Pluto 95 years ago today. The former planet will complete an orbit in another 153 years. On February 18, 1930, just two weeks after his 24th birthday, Clyde Tombaugh ...

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Some 4.5 billion years ago, the dwarf planet Pluto was suddenly joined by a companion. For a brief period – perhaps only hours – they danced as if arm in arm before gently separating, a grand do-si-do ...

Pluto and its moon Charon may have been briefly locked together in a cosmic “kiss”, before the dwarf planet released the smaller body and recaptured it in its orbit. Charon is the largest of Pluto’s ...

This close up look at Pluto and Charon, taken as part of the mission's latest optical navigation ("OpNav") campaign from Jan. 25-31, 2015, comes from the Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) on ...

For billions of years, Pluto and its largest moon Charon have been facing each other in a mutual tidal lock. Since it’s about half the size of Pluto, the moon and its planet are sometimes referred to ...

The planet Neptune wobbled in its orbit around the Sun. That could only mean one thing, astronomers said: There was a ninth planet out there, somewhere, lurking in the fringes of the solar system.