Pluto's unusual eccentricity and tilt is likely due to its interactions with neighboring Neptune and other giant planets, ...

Earth has a newly-discovered neighbor in the solar system. But the heavenly body – possibly a dwarf planet à la Pluto – isn't a frequent visitor. Located beyond Neptune, its extreme orbit ...

This video explains why planets in our solar system orbit in nearly the same plane, tracing their origins back to a rotating ...

Using Pluto as an example, this celestial body, once considered the ninth planet, was redefined as a dwarf planet in 2006.

NASA has launched a groundbreaking mission to study the heliosphere, the massive protective bubble surrounding our solar ...

Billions of years ago, in the frozen edges of the solar system, a violent impact shaped one of space’s oddest pairs. Instead of a typical planet-moon setup, Pluto and Charon became a binary system.

It circles the sun in an elongated and tilted orbit. For about 20 percent of its 248-year journey around the sun, it is within the orbit of Neptune. At its farthest distance it is nearly 50 times the ...

Astronomers have discovered 2017 OF21, a distant dwarf planet candidate located about 90 times farther from the Sun than ...

Eight years after being reduced to a "dwarf planet" by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, our far distant cousin is finally getting some real push to be upgraded back to the ninth "planet" ...

The methane gas may constitute a rarefied atmosphere, or it may come from erupting plumes on Makemake’s surface.

First, let’s compare the orbital characteristics of Pluto with those of other planets. Pluto has an orbital eccentricity (the degree to which its orbit deviates from a perfect circle) of 0.25, while ...