Facts about Pluto
- 11
Pluto's gravitational pull is so weak that an astronaut weighing 100 pounds on Earth would weigh only 7 pounds on its surface.
- 10
Roughly 50,000 times dimmer than the sun, Pluto receives so little solar radiation that its surface would appear as twilight during Earth's daytime.
- 09
Pluto's mass is only 0.18 times that of Earth's moon, making it less massive than seven other moons in our solar system including Europa and Titan.
- 08
Charon, Pluto's largest moon, is so massive that it orbits only 12,200 miles from Pluto's surface, closer than many satellites circle Earth.
- 07
Pluto's day lasts 6.4 Earth hours and rotates backwards compared to most planets, a phenomenon called retrograde rotation shared only with Venus and Uranus in our solar system.
- 06
Pluto's thin atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and carbon monoxide freezes and falls as snow onto its surface when it moves farther from the sun in its orbit.
- 05
Pluto's orbital period around the sun spans 248 Earth years, meaning it completed only one full orbit since its discovery in 1930.
- 04
Temperatures on Pluto plunge to minus 380 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the coldest known objects in our solar system.
- 03
Pluto's five known moons, including the largest Charon discovered in 1978, orbit so close that Pluto and Charon form a binary system where both bodies revolve around a point in space between them.
- 02
New Horizons spacecraft captured the first close-up images of Pluto on July 14, 2015, revealing a heart-shaped feature and nitrogen ice plains across its surface.
- 01
At 2,377 kilometers in diameter, Pluto is smaller than Earth's moon and was reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union in 2006.