The Facts Nearly Everyone Gets Wrong About Pluto

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Why is Pluto not a Planet?
How dark is it on Pluto?
How can Hubble see distant galaxies clearly, but not Pluto?
What do Pluto and Charon orbit around?

[Jubes]

If it's any consolation do the Pluto fans, it went from being the smallest planet to the king of the dwarf planets.

[pkqogdr]

3:21 very important visualisation, and a lot of people would benefit from watching that section in general. Galaxies aren't small, they're dim. Hubble's power is not in its ability to squint, but its attention span.

[tb]

Like only if you were born when Pluto was still a planet

[bullettube]

My grand-daughter asked me several years ago "why did they name Pluto after the Disney character". I had to explain that it was the reverse, Disney named Mickey's dog after Pluto the same year it was discovered in 1930. She is in college now and is a lot better informed then she used to be!

[wangshuntian]

that makes me feel even much more respect to the guy who found pluto.

[eelponna]

Pluto was such a surprise - many predicted that it would be a cold, dark, bland and inactive rock but it turned out to be a very strange and complex body with active surface features.

[realvanman]

Pluto being demoted from planet status had rather annoyed me as I grew up solidly with nine planets. But now that I know that the demotion is due to the discovery of an entire other asteroid belt, I feel privileged to have lived during the time of that discovery. Thanks for the education!

[j.p.ijsblok]

The fact that Pluto is classified as a dwarf planet doesn't make it any less beautiful.
And since it revealed it's hard it means it still loves us.

[benmcreynolds]

Once i saw detailed images of Pluto my mind was blown! I was not expecting that level of geological diversity, mineralization, signs of geologic activity, etc. Pluto has proven to be one of the most dynamic objects in our solar system. Only a few moons come close to Pluto's features. It makes me wonder what systems are fueling these dynamic aspects on Pluto? Is it tidal forces? Is it chemical reactions between different minerals? Is it certain elements that transition between solid ice form/liquid form/etc. depending on the pressure, friction, temperature it's experiencing? I'm really hoping to see a lot more research being done there. Pluto is s million times more interesting than Mars. Something that far away from the sun, it's amazing it's got interesting stuff occuring at all. I feel like there is a lot we can learn from Pluto.

[mialotusmusic]

Someone should make a VR or AR program to view galaxies more brightly, would be amazing! You could shift from visible light to infrared etc

[briancohen-doherty]

A tour of the dwarf planets would be fun

[KeithC-uxvv]

Nine is a magic number…stay strong Pluto 😊😊

[Atheistically]

I remember my daughter drawing Pluto in her school Science text book on a page containing information about eight planets of the Solar System and self reinstating it as the ninth planet . She was 9 then.

[saintuk]

The tiramisu dwarf-planet with a heart. I think it's fascinating and the fact it's active is really exciting - what else is out there.

[raybeauvais]

Every generation before us really had no idea how any of the planets actually looked in "Natural Light" 😉; and now every generation after us can spend their time on new questions.🧐
It has been an incredible 60 years! 🤯🤯

Thank you for these essays.

[DM-klem]

I cannot even begin to describe how excited I was about the New Horizons images of Pluto. I remember seeing a picture of Pluto in 1995, at a field trip to the planetarium. It was white, highly pixellated, and looked almost like an upside-down snowman with the moon Charon underneath it. This was believed to be Pluto's ONLY moon at the time.

[walterhelm]

Admittedly, Pluto is on the border between a planet and a Kuiper Belt object, but I still think it is large enough and similar enough to a planet to still be considered our ninth planet.

[borisbabich]

New Horizons was one of the most exciting things, of many, that humanity did in space.

[TheGhostGuitars]

05:35 There's another reason why Earth-based (both on or near Earth) telescopes have hard time imaging Pluto that Alex didn't mention:

The galaxies and stars are sources of lights (IR to UV to Radio and higher wavelengths) thus they are easier to see, versus Pluto which is mostly (99.99+%) illuminated by what little amounts of sunlight that managed to reach Pluto AND reflects off it back to Earth. That rule about light getting weaker the further light travels applies to BOTH travel directions out from the Sun to Pluto AND back to Earth.

This coupled with the incredibly tiny apparant relative size in the sky makes Pluto so durned hard to see.

PS: the remaining <0.01% visibility is from starlight but that would be impossible for our current technology to be able to detect any such tiny objects solely by starlight at that distances. We already having hard enuff time finding trans-neptunian and kuiper objects using what little sunlight that reaches that far out and can STILL be visible when it gets reflected back to us.

[jakegarvin]

Here's a hot take, not only is Pluto still a planet, but Charon is too! Hail the binary planets Pluto and Charon!