Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto in 1930 at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. Here's how Pluto won - and lost - its planetary ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. Jamie Carter is an award-winning reporter who covers the night sky.

“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 ...

because it dictates atmospheric circulation on the dwarf planet. The resulting winds etch Pluto’s face. Nitrogen winds blowing up to 20 miles per hour capture methane ice grains from Pluto’s ...

For 76 years, Pluto was considered the ninth planet of our Solar System ... a distant body of ice and rock in a vast abyss of near-nothingness. However, in 1992, David Jewitt and Jane Luu ...

However, some scientists argue that Pluto should be considered a planet based on geological activity rather than orbital mechanics. NASA’s New Horizons mission revealed ice mountains ...