There’s been a lot of buzz lately about the existence of a “new” planet in our solar system, a gas giant that has eluded discovery by astronomers thus far because of its purported incredibly distant orbit – over 350 times farther from the Sun than Pluto, or a whopping 15,000 times farther from the Sun…
Tag: Pluto
From the LITD Archives: Voyager’s Valentine
On February 14, 1990, after nearly 13 years of traveling the outer solar system the Voyager 1 spacecraft passed the orbit of Pluto and turned its camera around to take a series of photos of the planets. The image above shows those photos, isolated from the original series and labeled left to right, top to…
A Patchwork Pluto
The New Horizons spacecraft may still be several years away from its flyby of the outermost ex-planet, but the Hubble Space Telescope is meanwhile grabbing glimpses of the frozen world at the edge of our solar system. The video above is composed of hundreds of individual images of Pluto, assembled over the course of four…
Pluto Reinstated?
Will Pluto be reissued its former status as a full-fledged planet? While it won’t necessarily be a topic of debate at next week’s meeting of the International Astronomical Union – the group in charge of, amongst other things, the official naming of all things extraterrestrial and thus the group responsible for voting Pluto off the…
Lights in the Dark 