Tag Archives: pluto

Pluto is Red

Pluto is a completely different colour from the one we thought it was, according to new images that also show the huge heart that seems to be carved into its side.

Source: Pluto is red: New Horizons images throw out previous understanding of dwarf planet – News – Gadgets and Tech – The Independent

It’s going to take me a long time to mentally adjust my model. Pluto is blue in my head, probably from some bit of pop fiction some time in the past.

It’s going to be 18 months of trickling back all the data about Pluto, so even though the flyby is in just under 3 days, we’re going to be getting new information about our favorite dwarf planet all through the next year.

Why Pluto is not a planet

We used to think Pluto was all on it’s lonesome out in it’s far away orbit.  It turns out, we just got lucky in finding it, and it’s part of a class of objects, now called Trans Neptunian objects.  As more and more objects got discovered in the Kuiper belt it became pretty clear that there were good odds we’d find something larger than Pluto.  In 2005 we did, it’s now called Eris.