HAVE YOU HEARD OF DWARF PLANET?

Pluto was considered as the ninth and most distant planet from the sun and is now the largest known dwarf planet in the solar system. It is discovered in 1930; It is also one of the largest known members of the Kuiper Belt, a shadowy zone beyond the orbit of Neptune imagined to be gathered by hundreds of thousands of rocky, icy bodies each larger than 62 miles across, along with 1 trillion and comets. 
In 2006, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, a change widely considered as demotion. The question of Pluto's planet status has attracted many controversies and hot debates in the scientific community, and also among the public, since then. In 2017, a science group proposed a new definition of planethood based on "round objects in space smaller than stars," which would make the number of planets in our solar system expand from 8 to roughly 100.
Let’s ponder some of the facts about the Planet Pluto:
Pluto is named after the Roman god of the underworld, proposed by Venetia Burney an eleven year old schoolgirl from Oxford, England. Then Pluto was reclassified from a planet to a dwarf planet in 2006.This is when the IAU formalized the definition of a planet as “A planet is a celestial body if
(a) It is in orbit around the Sun,
(b) It has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium shape.
(c)Planet cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”
Pluto was discovered on February 18th, 1930 by the Lowell Observatory. For the 76 years between Pluto being discovered and the time it was reclassified as a dwarf planet it has completed under a third of its orbit around the Sun.
Pluto has five known moons. The moons are named Charon, Hydra and Nix, Kerberos originally P4 and Styx originally P5.
Pluto is one third water. It is in the form of water ice which is more than three times the water of Earth’s oceans and the remaining two third are rock. Planet’s surface is covered with ices, and has several mountain ranges, light and dark regions, and a scattering of craters.
Pluto is smaller than a number of moons.
These are Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Europa, Triton, and the Earth’s moon. Pluto has 66% of the diameter of the Earth’s moon and has 18% of its mass. It is now named as the largest dwarf planet for around 10 years it was thought that this was Eris.
Pluto sometimes has an atmosphere. It has a methane haze that overs about 161 kilometers above the surface. The methane is dissociated by sunlight into hydrocarbons that fall to the surface and coat the ice with a dark covering. When Pluto travels away from the Sun the atmosphere then freezes back to its solid state. Thus it bears atmosphere sometimes.

By-Saksham Gupta
Content- https://space-facts.com/pluto/