The result? A patchy, pixelated sphere just 12 pixels wide. Even from these images, Pluto seemed pretty intriguing. The light and dark pixels seemed to suggest geological or atmospheric activity.

“New Horizons shattered a major paradigm of planetary science,” says Alan Stern, the mission’s principal investigator. “Pluto turns out to have as much complexity as Mars or Earth, so much so that I ...

An curved arrow pointing right. NASA's New Horizons probe flew past Pluto last July, and it took the most detailed images of the planet that have ever been seen. NASA just released some of the ...

Gonggong is a dwarf planet and a member of the scattered disc beyond Neptune. As of 2019, its distance from the Sun is 88 AU, and it is the sixth-farthest known Solar System object.

FLAGSTAFF, Az. – Whether Pluto is officially a planet is the least interesting thing about the runt of the solar system, astronomers will tell you 95 years after the discovery of the fascinating ...

If you stood on Pluto's surface, the Sun would merely appear to be a very bright star. Although previous images showed that something was happening on Pluto, with an average temperature of -240C ...

For this very reason, we're going to have to wait hours, days, even months before we get the best, full-sized, high-resolution images from Pluto. How the data delay works New Horizons talks to ...

Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Here's how Pluto won - and lost - its planetary status.

One of the most memorable images taken by New Horizons is that of Pluto’s "heart" feature. The heart-shaped glacier, nicknamed Sputnik for Earth’s first human-made satellite, is nearly 600 ...

It wasn’t until 1930, about 15 years after Lowell’s death, that another Lowell Observatory astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, would find Pluto. "Interestingly, once the planet had been found, they went back ...