#pluto&039;s

Gravity waves may ripple through Pluto’s hazy atmosphere

Scientists are starting to get a clearer picture of how Pluto’s strange, hazy atmosphere works. Their latest discovery, concerning waves rippling through the dwarf planet’s atmosphere, means that Pluto shares some unexpected similarities with Earth. We have known about Pluto’s beautiful layers of atmospheric haze since New Horizons took a look at the back-lit dwarf planet just after its flyby in…

We are finally starting to understand Pluto’s place in the solar system

Pluto is a weird little world with a familiar planetary recipe. If you combine many of the materials found in the solar system — rocks, water, methane, nitrogen, carbon-monoxide — and assemble them into an object far from the sun, pummel it with impacts from other objects in the solar system and then wait billions of years, you might produce something like Pluto. Scientists have some sense of…

Pluto’s demotion is a great opportunity for science

I come to both bury Pluto, and to praise it—it being the decision to demote Pluto from the pantheon of planets. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union was faced with a growing collection of small, icy bodies similar in size to Pluto orbiting at the fringes of the Solar System. It settled on a new way of defining what constitutes a planet, one that left Pluto and its peers demoted to dwarf…

Space probe crossing Pluto’s ‘front yard’ has scientists in suspense

Nearly 3.5 billion miles from home, an intrepid spacecraft on the final leg of its streak to Pluto’s front door is expected to rendezvous with the planetary dwarf on July 14.

The New Horizons mission — the longest space voyage ever — is the last great American flyby of an alien world. Traveling at warp speed in a nine-year hurtle toward Pluto, the spacecraft has entered its so-called encounter…