Tag Archives: pluto

Blog 4

In first grade, I was really mad. Honestly, I was INFURIATED. I had just heard that they had officially reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet. For me, that meant that the pneumonic device I learned from my Dr. Suess’ book was a complete lie. In reality, the reclassification of Pluto was much more informative and […] Continue reading

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 New Horizons: Exploring Pluto and Beyond

Hello (again), and welcome (back) to my Astronomy Blog! Today we’re picking up where we left off with Pluto and the New Horizons mission.  The New Horizons Mission Although NASA approved the mission in 2001, the New Horizons mission officially entered the public conscience when the craft was launched on January 19th, 2006. The speedy […] Continue reading

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Pluto: New Horizon

Pluto, a dwarf planet farther out than Neptune in the Kuiper Belt, was once thought to be the ninth planet of our solar system. However, the discovery of Pluto’s moon, Charon, led to the revision of calculations on Pluto’s mass, and the redefinition of planets finally “kicked” Pluto out of the solar system planets since […] Continue reading

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Pluto: If Size Doesn’t Matter, What Does?

Pluto is one of the most underestimated discoveries of our solar system. What we expected to be a simple ice ball comet-like object in the very outreaches of our solar system ended up becoming one of the most interesting planetesimals that tell us a complex geology category. Many will know Pluto for its classification as […] Continue reading

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The Frozen World: Pluto

Pluto’s Icey Surface taken from the New Horizons Spacecraft Pluto is one of the most interesting “planets” in our solar system and for decades now has had constant debate surrounding it. Pluto has an extremely thin atmosphere, one that is a lot thinner than ours on earth that is made up of primarily nitrogen. Its […] Continue reading

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Blog 5 – Pluto

Pluto is a dwarf planet located in the Kuiper belt with an orbit time of roughly 248 years, as it is about 40 AU from the Sun on average. Relative to the eight planets on our solar system, its orbit is much more elliptical and inclined to the ecliptic plane, allowing it to get closer […] Continue reading

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Post 5

In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) declared that Pluto was not a planet, but rather a dwarf planet. This was largely because Pluto is relatively small (smaller than our moon) and it belongs to the Kuiper Belt—a body of comets/large objects that orbit the sun on the outer edges of the solar system. This […] Continue reading

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The Principal Investigator of the New Horizons Mission

I like to write my blog posts about a specific topic we discussed in class or used in a homework assignment. The most recent homework assignment concerning the speech given by Alan Stern was especially fascinating to me. Stern did a great job in discussing the New Horizons mission, he covered everything from the team […] Continue reading

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Pluto

Pluto is a particularly interesting dwarf planet, which […] Continue reading

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The Dwarf Planet Debate

(picture of the colorization of Pluto) We all know the controversy that Pluto causes. Should it be a planet? Should it not be one? Why should or shouldn’t it be?  Although astronomers and other scientists claim that Pluto should not be considered a planet, some researches believe that this decision was unfair and incorrect and […] Continue reading

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