Facts about Pluto :The once upon a planet


 * Till 2006 Pluto was counted as the ninth and outer most planet of the solar system,and the smallest of them all.


 * It is even smaller than our moon .In 2006, it is re-classified by International astronomical union as a dwarf planet.


 * The search for the ninth planet began after the orbits of Uranus and Neptune have found to be anomalies could be explained only by the gravitational pull of a planet that is Neptune.


 * LOWELL used a telescope to photograph the area of the sky where he thought the actual planet would be found and did actual photograph of it on two occasions -on 19 March and 17 April in 1915.But LOWELL failed to identify the ninth planet in those photographs.He died in 1916 without finding it.


 * In 1929 a 22 year old American amateur named CLYDE W. TOMBAUGH was hired by the LOWELL Observatory specifically to search for the ninth planet.He used the predictions mad by LOWELL and other astronomers and photographed the sky with a more powerful wide-field telescope.On 18 February 1930,he found Pluto's images on three of the photographs.


 * The new planet was named Pluto after the GREEK GOD OF WEALTH.The name also honours PERCIVAL LOWELL whose initials are the first two letters of Pluto.


 * Pluto's highly eccentric orbit surprised the astronomers of the time. The distance between Sun and Pluto is found to range from 4.4 billion kilometres when closest to 7.4 billion kilometres when farthest-a difference of 2950 kilometres.


 * The orbit of Pluto is the most unusual of solar system, because it tilts at an angle of 17 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic.


 * From Pluto the Sun would look like a tiny dot in the sky.


 * Pluto completes one orbit around the sun in 248.54 earth years.


 * Pluto has 4 other moons named Hydra, Styx, Nix and Kerberos which are much smaller.


 * The glimpses of Pluto's surface with some hazy details were available only in 1996 from images taken by Hubble Space Telescope.

The distance of Pluto from Earth varies from 4.3 to 7.5 billion kilometres.