Pluto, the ninth planet from the Sun, is the smallest, least understood planet of all. Its was not discovered until 1930 but as with Neptune, its place in the solar system ws predicted may years earlier.
At first it seemed as though Pluto was egg shaped until astronomers realized thats its one moon. Charon orbited so close to Pluto that even through the most powerful earth telescopes they looked like one planet. The Hubble Space Telescope, however, has shown them to be about twelve thousand miles apart, still extremely close in space terms. Like the Earth and the Moon, Pluto and its moon, Charon, are considered double planet systems. Pluto has an unusual orbital path around the sun that actually allows it to cross inside Neptune's orbit for a period of about twenty years out of its 248 year orbit. This means that Neptune becomes the farthest planet from the Sun for this short period of time. Did you know? If you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, you would weigh only 8 pounds on the ice covered planet of Pluto.
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