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Introduction
Welcome to my science project! My project is all about the dwarf planet, Pluto. I hope that you enjoy my timeline that I’ve created. Hopefully, you will learn some new things about Pluto. Let’s get started! -
The Search Begins
In 1902, the astronomer, Percival Lowell, saw that the orbits of comets seemed to show that there was a planet beyond Neptune. He began a search for the mysterious planet in 1905 at his observatory in Arizona. He died in 1916 and left all his work in his observatory. His wife, Constance, found his work and the search for Planet X, as he called it. In 1927, a new telescope was built especially for the search, which began with Lowell Observatory assistant, Clyde Tombaugh. -
Pluto Discovered
Tombaugh took many photographs of the sky where Lowell had predicted Planet X would be. He compared photos taken days apart by using a blink comparator. Stars would still, but a planet would move between the time the photos were taken, and the rapid blinking of the comparator would make it rapidly move back and forth. After less than a year of searching, Tombaugh found Pluto on two plates taken in January 1930. -
Pluto Gets its Name
The discovery of Pluto was announced on March 13th, 1930. The next day Falconer Madan, who had been the head of the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, read the news to his grand daughter, Venetia. Venetia knew her mythology and suggested the name Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld. Madan contacted his friend, Herbert Hall Turner, who contacted Lowell University. Tombaugh selected Pluto, which had Percival Lowell’s initials as its first two letters. -
Charon Discovered
Pluto was thought to be alone at the edge of the solar system, but U.S. Naval Observatory astronomers, James Christy, and Robert Harrington noticed that images they had taken of Pluto had a bump. They looked at earlier images of Pluto and noticed that the bump moved around Pluto with a period of 6.4 days. Pluto had a moon! Charon! -
Pluto Crosses Neptune's Orbit
Most planets have a roughly sphere-shaped orbit, but Pluto’s is more stretched out like an oval. Pluto’s orbit has a higher eccentricity than the other planets’ orbits. A circle has an eccentricity of 0. Pluto, however, has an eccentricity of 0.251, which means that its orbit crosses that of Neptune, making Pluto farther from the Sun. -
Nix and Hydra Discovered
Astronomers using the Hubble SpaceTelescope discovered these two moons. Nix and Hydra are small and elongated, both are about 55 km long, but Hydra is the thicker of the two, 34 km across. These two moons wobble chaotically because they orbit in the constantly changing gravitational field of Pluto and Charon, which rotate around each other. -
New Horizons Launched
To explore the Pluto-Charon system, NASA designed the small New Horizons probe and put it on one of its largest rockets, the Atlas V. When it left Earth, New Horizons was the fastest spacecraft ever, zooming to the end of the solar system at a speed of more than 58,000 km (36,000 miles) per hour. With the exploration of Pluto, NASA probes would have visited every planet. -
Planet to Dwarf Planet
Pluto was always odd among the planets. It wasn’t small, rocky, and close to the Sun like the terrestrial planets. It wasn’t a large ball of gas like the gas giants. For decades it was unique, in the early 21st Century, bodies the size of Pluto and Charon were discovered at the edge of the solar system in the Kuiper Belt. One of them, Eris, was even larger than Pluto. When scientists discovered this, they demoted a Pluto to dwarf planet. Should our solar system have any more planets? -
New Horizons Flies by Pluto… Finally
After nine and a half years of travel, New Horizons reached its destination. As it got closer, it saw unusual features on Pluto, such as a dark region near the equator called the “whale” and a lighter heart-shaped region. New Horizons came within 12 500 km of Pluto and 28 800 km of Charon. New Horizons was expected to continue over the following months to send information from its encounter back to Earth and get ready for its next destination. -
One Plutonian New Year Since Discovery
Pluto is so far from the Sun that it takes a little more than 248 Earth years to complete one orbit. This date would be the first anniversary of Pluto. Who knows? This date is so far in the future that maybe humans will be there to ring in the first Plutonian New Year. -
Conclusion
Thank you so much for viewing my timeline on Pluto. I hope you learned about Pluto. Hopefully, you are now an expert on all of the most important dates in this dwarf planet’s history (if you didn’t know that Pluto is a dwarf planet after viewing my presentation, you were not listening). BYE! -
Bibliography
Research:
-https://tinyurl.com/y6jvqvqa
-https://tinyurl.com/y52366m9
-https://tinyurl.com/y76o7sta
-https://tinyurl.com/yxk5omqk
Pics:
-https://tinyurl.com/yypmuvqe
-https://tinyurl.com/y6m5uqq2
-https://tinyurl.com/yyhlob29
-https://tinyurl.com/yyey42gf
-https://tinyurl.com/y3p9tks3
-https://tinyurl.com/y2r7q66b
-https://tinyurl.com/y4xvanf2
-https://tinyurl.com/ojhnsxz
-https://tinyurl.com/yycwmvc7
-https://tinyurl.com/yyndl8jx
