What does Pluto look like?
- Rachael Bolton
- Aug 10, 2015
- 1 min read
At the beginning of this year, a space probe that was launched 9 years ago started to approach the dwarf planet Pluto.
Humans had never seen pictures of the surface Pluto before.
The probe is called New Horizons and its job was to fly all the way to Pluto and collect scientific information about it.
The probe has discovered a few new things about Pluto that we never knew:
- Pluto is bigger than people used to think. It is about two-thirds of the size of our moon.
- Pluto is very icy.
- Pluto looks red because of some unusual stuff that is happening in the gases that cover its surface.
- Parts of Pluto are smooth, which scientists believe means parts of it must be very hot. The heat would melt its rocky surfaces and make them smooth. But no body knows where this heat comes from - it’s a big mystery!
- Pluto has a tail like a comet, with loads of gas streaming off behind it as it whizzes around its orbit of the Sun.
It is going to take nearly a year and a half for all the information the probe collects to be sent back to earth.
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