Pluto

Pluto gets a bad rap nowadays. A lot of folks would like to demote it from its status as a planet, due to its size and orbit — not to mention the discovery of new Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), some of which are as big or bigger than Pluto. Others have proposed (I think more reasonably) that we should treat Pluto as the baseline for new planetary classification (for tradition’s sake, if nothing else). Whatever the final determination, for now this is officially the Ninth Planet of our Solar System.

Charon, Pluto’s “moon”, is more properly considered as a companion body since they orbit around a point between themselves — some call them a double planet. They also forever present the same face to each other. There is some poetry in that.

• Pluto at nineplanets.org
• Pluto at wikipedia.org
• NASA’s New Horizons Pluto Kuiper Belt Flyby
• Pluto, Charon, and USA Comparison

Map of Pluto

Hubble reveals new map of Pluto ‘Astronomers have produced a new colour map of Pluto … using images from the Hubble Space Telescope.’