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Pluto's orbit is surprisingly unstable

In 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered the fabled "Ninth Planet" (or "Planet X") while working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. The existence of this body had been predicted previously based on perturbations ...

Giant ice volcanoes identified on Pluto

Strange lumpy terrain on Pluto unlike anything previously observed in the solar system indicates that giant ice volcanoes were active relatively recently on the dwarf planet, scientists said on Tuesday.

Clues to Pluto's history lie in its faults

The world first glimpsed Pluto up close when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft whizzed by it in July 2015. One of the most exciting discoveries scientists made based on New Horizons data was that Pluto, despite orbiting at more ...

Hubble lends a helping hand

Far above rain clouds, light pollution, and atmospheric distortion, NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has a clear view of the universe. It has shown us distant galaxies, tracked interstellar objects as they soar through our solar ...

Scientists confirm decrease in Pluto's atmospheric density

When Pluto passed in front of a star on the night of August 15, 2018, a Southwest Research Institute-led team of astronomers had deployed telescopes at numerous sites in the U.S. and Mexico to observe Pluto's atmosphere as ...

NASA's New Horizons reaches a rare space milestone

In the weeks following its launch in early 2006, when NASA's New Horizons was still close to home, it took just minutes to transmit a command to the spacecraft, and hear back that the onboard computer received and was ready ...

New Horizons spacecraft answers the question: How dark is space?

How dark is the sky, and what does that tell us about the number of galaxies in the visible universe? Astronomers can estimate the total number of galaxies by counting everything visible in a Hubble deep field and then multiplying ...

New evidence our neighborhood in space is stuffed with hydrogen

Only the two Voyager spacecraft have ever been there, and it took than more than 30 years of supersonic travel. It lies well past the orbit of Pluto, through the rocky Kuiper belt, and on for four times that distance. This ...

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