Pluto:

Introduction:

Pluto is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of planets beyond Neptune's orbit. Its minor-planet name is 134340 Pluto. It directly orbits the Sun and is the ninth-largest and tenth-most massive object known to exist. It is marginally bigger than Eris in terms of mass, but it is the largest trans-Neptunian object by volume. Pluto is significantly smaller than the inner planets and is mostly formed of ice and rock, like other Kuiper belt objects. Pluto has only one-sixth the mass and one-third the volume of the moon of Earth.

 

Pluto

Pluto's orbit, which ranges from 30 to 49 astronomical units (4.5 to 7.3 billion kilometers; 2.8 to 4.6 billion miles) from the Sun, is fairly eccentric and inclined. At its typical distance, light from the Sun takes 5.5 hours to reach Pluto (39.5 AU [5.91 billion km; 3.67 billion mi]). Although Pluto's eccentric orbit occasionally gets it closer to the Sun than Neptune, their paths are kept apart by a steady orbital resonance.

 

Pluto has five known moons: Kerberos, Styx, Nix, and the biggest, Charon, whose diameter is just about half that of Pluto. Due to their tidally locked orbits and the fact that their barycenters do not fall within either body, Pluto and Charon are occasionally referred to as a binary system. The New Horizons mission, which made a flyby of Pluto and its moons on July 14, 2015, and collected extensive data, was the first spacecraft to visit Pluto and its satellites.

 

In 1930, Pluto—the first object in the Kuiper belt—was found. It was promptly hailed as the ninth planet, but when it was discovered to be significantly smaller than anticipated, its planetary status was called into question. These reservations grew when more Kuiper belt objects were discovered starting in the 1990s, especially the larger dispersed disk object Eris in 2005. The term "planet" was officially revised by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006 to exclude minor planets like Pluto. Pluto and other dwarf planets are still regarded as planets by many planetary astronomers.

 

Pluto

Name and a Sign:

The discovery garnered international media attention. More than 1,000 names were suggested to Lowell Observatory, which had the authority to name the new object; these names ranged from Atlas to Zymal. Tombaugh pushed Slipher to make an immediate name suggestion for the new item before someone else did. Zeus was first suggested by Constance Lowell, then Percival, and finally Constance. These recommendations were ignored.

 

The Greek/Roman god of the underworld was the inspiration for the name Pluto, which was suggested by Venetia Burney (1918–2009), an 11-year-old Oxford, England, schoolgirl who was fascinated in classical mythology. She came up with the idea during a talk with her grandpa Falconer Madan, a former librarian at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford. Herbert Hall Turner then forwarded the name to American astronomy colleagues by wire.

 

Each Lowell Observatory member was given the opportunity to vote on one of three shortlisted names: Pluto, Cronus, or Minerva. Minerva was eliminated because it had already been used for an asteroid, Cronus suffered a bad reputation because it had been proposed by Thomas Jefferson Jackson See, an unpopular astronomer. There was a consensus choice for Pluto. The name was released on May 1 of that year. Madan rewarded Venetia for the news by giving her £5 (which would be about £336 or $394 in 2021).

 

The fact that Pluto's first two letters are also Percival Lowell's initials contributed to the final naming selection. Pluto's planetary emblem was later made as a monogram of the letters "PL," albeit it is no longer often used in astronomy (Pluto monogram.svg, Unicode U+2647: ). For instance, appears in a listing of the planets denoted by their symbols from a 2004 paper written before the IAU definition of 2006, but not in a graph of planets, dwarf planets, and moons from 2016, where only the eight IAU planets are denoted by their symbols. The IAU forbids the use of planetary symbols in general and the monogram is also used in astrology, however the most popular astrological symbol for Pluto isThere is an orb over Pluto's bident, at least according to English-language sources (Pluto symbol (fixed width).svg, Unicode U+2BD3: ). Since the IAU's ruling on dwarf planets, the bident sign has also been used in astronomy. For instance, the NASA/JPL Dawn project created a public-education poster on dwarf planets in 2015, in which each of the five declared dwarf planets is given a symbol. There are a number of additional symbols for Pluto that can be found in European astrological sources, three of which are recognized by Unicode: Pluto symbol (southern Europe).svg, U+2BD4; Charon symbol (fixed width).svg, U+2BD5; and Pluto symbol (northern Europe).svg/Pluto symbol (northern Europe, variant).svg, U+2BD6. These symbols depict Pluto's orbit

 

The term "Pluto" was quickly accepted by the larger community. Although Disney animator Ben Sharpsteen was unable to authenticate the moniker's origin, it is believed that Walt Disney was influenced by it in 1930 when he gave Mickey Mouse a canine buddy by the name of Pluto. Following the trend of naming elements after recently discovered planets, such as uranium, which was called after Uranus, and neptunium, which was named after Neptune, Glenn T. Seaborg named the newly synthesized element plutonium after Pluto in 1941.