“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 ...

But Charon was half the size of Pluto itself, so big that the Pluto-Charon combination are sometimes referred to as a double planet, according to NASA. In August 2006 the International ...

A combination of cosmic processes shapes the formation of one of the most common types of planets outside of our solar system, according to a new study.

Pluto was discovered at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1930 and was considered our ninth planet until 2006. The International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet ...

This size ratio makes the Pluto-Charon system a rarity, often referred to as a binary planet system. Unlike Earth, where the Moon orbits the planet, Pluto and Charon orbit each other, forming a ...