According to the IAU, a dwarf planet is as related to a planet as an asteroid is -- not at all. This hard definition has been drawing criticism since the IAU demoted Pluto in a 9-8 vote in 2006.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered that a hazy sky over frozen Pluto is helping to cool the dwarf planet's atmosphere, while at the same time giving methane and other organic ...

Because Pluto is so dim, you need a telescope to see it. “A backyard telescope could do it under the right conditions,” says ...

But the heavenly body – possibly a dwarf planet à la Pluto – isn't a frequent visitor. Located beyond Neptune, its extreme orbit circumnavigates the sun once every 25,000 years, taking it ...

For reference, Pluto’s average distance from the Sun is about 40 AU, so 2023 KQ14 is quite distant. At 23.4 billion miles (37 ...

In the time Pluto was found, classified as a planet and reclassified as a dwarf planet, it has not completed one orbit. One year on the distant ice planet is 248 Earth years, and one day is 153 ...

The post Scientists Might Just Have Discovered Another Dwarf Planet Sibling For Pluto first on TwistedSifter. In 2006, Ceres – located in our solar system’s main asteroid belt – was officially ...

For many people, the definition of a planet was only made clear in 2006, when the spunky world Pluto was demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet. Now, a team of astronomers is pushing for ...

For the dwarf planet Pluto, however, the predicted temperature based on the composition of its atmosphere was much higher than actual measurements taken by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft in 2015.

New discoveries of objects in the Kuiper Belt have also presented challenges for the Planet Nine theory. The latest is known ...