average
distance
from the Sun:
5,916,000,000 km
diameter:
about 1426 miles = 2300 km
mass: about 13,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg
temperature: about -369 F (brrrrrr!)
number of moons: 1
any rings? no
length of a year: 248 of our years
length of a day: 6.387 days
Pluto is probably a big chunk of rock
and ice that is covered by a layer of frozen nitrogen and carbon
monoxide. None of our flying robot explorers have gone by Pluto... So,
there's a lot about Pluto that we just aren't sure of. Pluto has a
reddish color due to fit's frozen methane being hit with radiation for
billions of years. (Our drawing is of a black and white picture.)
No way! Brrrrrr... It's WAY too cold!
It's the furthest away from the Sun and coldest planet in the solar
system (except, possibly, for the frozen ice on our
moon). We think the thin atmosphere is made of nitrogen and carbon
dioxide. You definitely don't want to try to breathe this stuff! There
is frozen water on Pluto, but it's under a bunch of frozen poison stuff.
To escape Pluto's gravity and get out
into space, a rocket has to travel at a speed of 2,727 mph or 1.2
km/sec. That's about 42 times faster than your parents are allowed to
drive on a U.S. highway!
Pluto's only known moon, Charon, was
discovered in 1978. The really cool thing is the way Pluto and Charon
rotate... As Charon moves around Pluto, they each keep the same face
towards each other all the time. No, they really aren't striped, we just
did that so you can see it more clearly.
Pluto was discovered by accident.
Scientists thought they had predicted the existence of a ninth planet
because they found a wobble in Neptune's orbit. This would mean that
there was something big pulling on it - like a ninth planet. They
pointed their telescopes to where they figured this ninth planet would
be. They looked and looked and found nothing. It turned out that the
wobble they found was only a mistake in their data! A long time later,
the ninth planet, Pluto was found... But it had nothing to do with this
other search.
One
of the coolest things about Pluto is that it rotates in the opposite
direction of most of the other planets! If we look down on the planets from
above we see that Pluto rotates clockwise (the way a clock's hand move
around the clock) and all the other planets (except Uranus and Venus) and
all the moons spin
counterclockwise (like if the clock's hands were moving backwards).
Check out this picture:
Scientists
think there may be thousands of little icy planets like Pluto on the
outer edge of our solar system.
It
would take 500 Pluto's to equal the Earth's mass.
NASA
is has plans to make a new flying robot explorer that will fly by Pluto in 2013.
The project is called the Pluto-Kuiper Express and it will give us a
really close up look!
Sources:
In Quest of the Universe, 2nd ed. by Karl F. Kuhn
Voyages Through the Universe, 2nd ed. by Fraknoi, Morrison and Wolff
Universe by Kaufmann
The Complete Idiot's Guide to Astronomy by Christopher De Pree and Alan
Axelrod
The Astronomy Cafe by Sten Odenwald
.....:::::::::::::::
HELP SUPPORT COOLMATH :::::::::::::::..... :::::::
link to us
:::::::
advertise with us
:::::::
