Here are 21 Interesting Pluto facts.
1-5 Pluto Facts
1. Pluto is, by law, still a planet in New Mexico. – Source
2. Between the time it was discovered and the time it was unclassified as a planet, Pluto didn’t even complete one revolution around the sun. – Source
3. There exists a planet between Mars and Jupiter known as Ceres. It’s a dwarf planet, like Pluto, and may contain water and an atmosphere. – Source
4. The guy who discovered Pluto was a farmer who built his own telescopes from salvaged junk parts. – Source
5. Pluto wasn’t the first object to losing its planet status. In the 1800s more than a dozen objects (now classified as asteroids) lost their planetary status. – Source
6-10 Pluto Facts
6. The amount of light Pluto receives from the Sun is about 240 times the amount of light the Earth receives from a full Moon. – Source
7. The guy who discovered Pluto’s moon Charon made up the name to resemble his wife’s name, Charlene. He later discovered that in Greek mythology, Charon was the ferryman who brought the souls of the dead across the river Styx to Hades, AKA Pluto. – Source
8. The New Horizons spacecraft, which reached Pluto in July 2015, had on board the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the planet in 1930. – Source
9. On April Fools Day 1976, English astronomer Patrick Moore stated to radio listeners that due to “a conjunction of Jupiter and Pluto” gravity would noticeably decrease on Earth. Shortly after, the BBC received hundreds of calls from people reporting they had felt the decrease in gravity. – Source
10. Sending the New Horizons space probe to Pluto on a 15-year mission costs less than building the new Minnesota Vikings stadium. – Source
11-15 Pluto Facts
11. Clyde Tombaugh, the farmer who discovered Pluto enrolled in university two years after his discovery of Pluto. He wanted to take an introductory course in astronomy but the professor wouldn’t let him as he thought it would create awkward academic implications for a discoverer of a planet to be taking beginning astronomy. – Source
12. The dark region on the north pole of Pluto’s moon, Charon, is called Mordor. – Source
13. There is a 4 billion to 1 scale model of the solar system in Gainesville, FL. It spans almost a mile, and when Pluto was declared a non-planet, the organization behind the Solar Walk said “I don’t give a f*ck” and kept Pluto anyway. – Source
14. In the 1980’s an unemployed man named Dennis Hope wrote a letter to the UN claiming ownership of the Moon and they never disputed his claim. He has since sold over 600 million acres of land on the Moon, as well as land on Mercury, Venus, Mars, Pluto, and one of Jupiter’s moons. – Source
15. Pluto is smaller than Russia. – Source
16-21 Pluto Facts
16. When Neil deGrasse Tyson was director of Hayden Planetarium, he didn’t put Pluto in with the rest of the Planets and is thus credited with starting the Pluto planetary debate. – Source
17. There is compelling evidence that there might be a Ninth planet orbiting the Sun past the orbit of Pluto with a size comparable to Neptune’s. – Source
18. The IAU (International Astronomical Union) approves the naming of all Astronomical Objects and all of Pluto’s features are required to be related to dark mythology. – Source
19. An eleven-year-old girl was the first to suggest naming Pluto for the then newly discovered planet. – Source
20. Hubble Space Telescope can get detailed views of distant galaxies but not of Pluto. – Source
21. There are ice volcanos on Pluto. – Source
