“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 ...

Pluto is too far away from Earth to be seen with the naked eye. If you stood on Pluto's surface, the Sun would merely appear to be a very bright star. Although previous images showed that ...

The relative quantities of volatile gases like methane and ethane can reveal key details about distant Kuiper Belt objects.

Still that date will be one to circle on cosmic calendars. It takes Pluto slightly over 248 Earth years to orbit the sun, ...

But Pluto and Charon are different from Earth and the Moon, too – they are both smaller (the Moon is 3,475 kilometers across) and much, much colder, made up of rock and ice. When the researchers ...

The triple star system is sending comets, asteroids and meteors our way, and the number of interstellar objects entering the solar system will rise.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft conducted the first and only flyby of the Pluto system, culminating at the closest approach of that distant world in July 2015. Sailing onward, the probe carried out ...

The first time you may have heard the term ‘dwarf planet’ was when Pluto got demoted to one in 2006 (RIP). However, we actually have six in our Solar System. Pluto, Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris ...