Latest Pluto Stories
JPL -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has identified two huge "hypergiant" stars circled by monstrous disks of what might be planet-forming dust. The findings surprised astronomers because stars as big as these were thought to be inhospitable to planets."These extremely massive stars are tremendously hot and bright and have very strong winds, making the job of building planets difficult," said Joel Kastner of the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. "Our...
By Patricia ReaneyLONDON (Reuters) - A distant object discovered in space last year which could be the 10th planet in our solar system is around a third bigger than Pluto, German astrophysicists said on Wednesday.They determined the diameter of the potential new planet, known as 2003 UB313, by measuring its thermal emission."We actually measured the size of UB313 which was not known prior to these observations," Professor Frank Bertoldi, of the University of Bonn and the Max Planck...
By Patricia Reaney LONDON (Reuters) - A distant object discovered in space last year which could be the 10th planet in our solar system is around a third bigger than Pluto, German astrophysicists said on Wednesday. They determined the diameter of the potential new planet, known as 2003 UB313, by measuring its thermal emission. "We actually measured the size of UB313 which was not known prior to these observations," Professor Frank Bertoldi, of the University of Bonn and the Max Planck...
LOS ANGELES -- Scientists say they have confirmed that a so-called 10th planet discovered last year is bigger than Pluto, but that likely won't quell the debate over what makes a planet. The astronomers who spotted the icy, rocky body - informally called UB313 - had reported only a rough estimate of its size based on its brightness. But another group of researchers has come up with what is believed to be the first calculation of UB313's diameter. By measuring how much heat it radiates, German...
By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The world's first mission to Pluto blasted into space on Thursday after its launch aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket to begin a 9 1/2-year journey to the only unexplored planet in the solar system. "It's now our job to be good stewards of the spacecraft. and to learn to fly it in the real environment that it was built for," Alan Stern, the mission's lead scientist from the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told a...
By Irene KlotzCAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The world's first mission to Pluto blasted into space on Thursday on an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket to begin a 9 1/2-year journey to the only unexplored planet in the solar system.After two days of delays due to poor weather and a power outage, the 197-foot-tall (60-metre-tall) rocket, built by Lockheed Martin Corp., lifted off at 2 p.m. (1900 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.The launch team remained on edge until 45 minutes later when...
By Irene Klotz CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - The world's first mission to Pluto blasted into space on Thursday on an Atlas 5 unmanned rocket to begin a 9 1/2-year journey to the only unexplored planet in the solar system. After two days of delays due to poor weather and a power outage, the 197-foot tall (60-meter) rocket, built by Lockheed Martin Corp., lifted off at 2 p.m. EST (1900 GMT) from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. High winds at the Florida launch site forced the...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- An unmanned NASA spacecraft the size and shape of a concert piano hurtled toward Pluto on Thursday on a 3-billion-mile journey to the solar system's last unexplored planet - a voyage so long that some of the scientists who will be celebrating its arrival are still in junior high.The New Horizons spacecraft blasted off aboard an Atlas V rocket in a spectacular start to the $700 million mission. Though it is the fastest spacecraft ever launched, capable of reaching...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - NASA canceled Wednesday's launch of the U.S. space agency's first probe to Pluto after the mission control headquarters in Maryland lost power, officials said. The launch of the piano-sized New Horizons spacecraft on a massive Atlas 5 rocket had been postponed from Tuesday due to high winds at the launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. NASA officials said it was not immediately clear why mission control at Johns Hopkins University's Applied...
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Bad weather forced NASA to scrub its first planned launch of an unmanned spacecraft on a nine-year voyage to Pluto, the solar system's last unexplored planet, and strong winds were threatening another delay Wednesday.The launch of the New Horizons probe was called off Tuesday afternoon after winds at the launch pad exceeded the space agency's 38 mph flight restriction."The winds picked up sooner than expected," said MIT scientist Richard Binzel, one of the...
Latest Pluto Reference Libraries
Planet -- A planet is a body of considerable mass that orbits a star and that doesn't produce energy through nuclear fusion. Until recently, only nine were known (all of them in our own Solar system). As of the end of 2002 over 100 are known, with all of the new discoveries being extrasolar planets. Astronomers often call asteroids minor planets, and call the larger planetary bodies (those which are commonly called planets) major planets. Planets within the solar system can be...
Asteroid -- An asteroid, also called a minor planet or planetoid, is a member of a group of small, planet-like bodies that are part of our solar system. They are believed to be remnants of the interstellar clouds, nebula, that were not incorporated into planets during the formation of the solar system. The largest asteroid in the inner solar system is Ceres with a diameter of 1003 km. It also was the first to be discovered, by Giuseppe Piazzi on January 1, 1801. Nowadays, over 9000...
Quaoar -- Quaoar ("kwah-oh-ahr", /kwA o Ar/) is a Trans-Neptunian object circling the Sun in the Kuiper belt, discovered in 2002 by astronomers Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. Quaoar is estimated to have a diameter of about 1,280 kilometres, which would make it the largest Solar System object discovered since Pluto and, indeed, the largest known minor planet. Larger than all the asteroids put together, it is about one...
Kuiper Belt -- The Kuiper belt is an area of the solar system extending outwards from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to 50 AU. The largest of the objects in the Kuiper belt are the planet Pluto and its moon Charon. A new Kuiper belt object, currently called 2001 KX76, has been found that is about the size of Charon, and larger than Ceres. Another such object, Quaoar, discovered in 2002, is half the size of Pluto. Other known Kuiper belt objects are progressively smaller. The exact...
Planet Charon -- Charon is the only known satellite of Pluto. Charon was discovered by astronomer James Christy in 1978 using photographic plates which showed a bulge moving around Pluto. Christy named it after the Greek mythological figure Charon but pronounced it differently. The "ch" at the beginning of the moon's name is soft so it sounds like "Sharon," after the astronomer's wife Charlene, nicknamed Char, which both have soft ch sounds. The mythological figure's name is...
