Pluto how long to travel

But after the discovery of similar intriguing worlds deeper in the distant Kuiper Belt, icy Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet.

Pluto is only about 1, miles wide. At that small size, Pluto is only about half the width of the United States. It's about 3. Pluto is orbited by five known moons, the largest of which is Charon. Charon is about half the size of Pluto itself, making it the largest satellite relative to the planet it orbits in our solar system. Pluto and Charon are often referred to as a "double planet. Pluto is the only world so far named by an year-old girl.

In , Venetia Burney of Oxford, England, suggested to her grandfather that the new discovery be named for the Roman god of the underworld. He forwarded the name to the Lowell Observatory and it was selected.

Pluto's moons are named for other mythological figures associated with the underworld. Charon is named for the river Styx boatman who ferries souls in the underworld as well as honoring Sharon, the wife of discoverer James Christy ; Nix is named for the mother of Charon, who is also the goddess of darkness and night; Hydra is named for the nine-headed serpent that guards the underworld; Kerberos is named after the three-headed dog of Greek mythology and called Fluffy in the Harry Potter novels , and Styx is named for the mythological river that separates the world of the living from the realm of the dead.

Pluto's place in mythology can get a little muddled, so we asked Dr. However, the Greek name "Plouton" from which the Romans derived their name "Pluto" was also occasionally used as an alternative name for Hades.

But Pluto is definitely the Roman spelling. The surface of Pluto is extremely cold, so it seems unlikely that life could exist there. At such cold temperatures, water, which is vital for life as we know it, is essentially rock-like.

Pluto's interior is warmer, however, and some think there could even be an ocean deep inside. If Earth was the size of a nickel, Pluto would be about as big as a popcorn kernel. From an average distance of 3. One astronomical unit abbreviated as AU , is the distance from the Sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 5. There is a moment each day near sunset here on Earth when the light is the same brightness as midday on Pluto.

Find out when you can experience "Pluto time" where you live. Pluto's orbit around the Sun is unusual compared to the planets: it's both elliptical and tilted. Pluto's year-long, oval-shaped orbit can take it as far as One AU is the mean distance between Earth and the Sun: about 93 million miles or million kilometers. But on average, Pluto is 3. From to , Pluto was near perihelion, when it is closest to the Sun. During this time, Pluto was actually closer to the Sun than Neptune.

Could you get to Pluto faster? With a more powerful rocket, and a lighter spacecraft payload, you could definitely shave down the flight time. But there are a couple of problems. Rockets are expensive, coincidentally bigger rockets are super expensive. So how long does it take to get to Pluto? Roughly years. Are you super excited about the New Horizons flyby of Pluto?

Tell us all about it in the comments below. Podcast audio : Download Duration: — 3. Podcast video : Download Duration: — Enormous distances keep the human mind in Perihelion and Aphelion: we get near then we go far. The New Horizons spacecraft mission to Pluto is a truly stunning adventure.

At its most distant, when the two bodies are on the opposite sides of the sun from one another, Pluto lies 4. At their closest, the two are only 2. After the sun formed, the remaining dust and gas evolved into the planets that make up our solar system. This means that most of them orbit on a nearly flat plane in relation to one another. But after its formation , Pluto wound up out of sync, its orbit tipped to an angle of about 17 degrees in relation to this plane.

The dwarf planet's orbit is also highly elliptical, making it a very stretched-out circle. This allows the Pluto to dip inside of the orbit of Neptune for 20 of the years it takes the dwarf planet to orbit the sun.

Pluto last entered Neptune's orbit on Feb. Its highly elliptical orbit means that the atmosphere of the dwarf planet changes over time, expanding and contracting as its components freeze and melt. Because the distance to Pluto is so great, it lies inside the Kuiper Belt , a group of rocks and ices left over from the formation of the solar system.

With its icy crust and rocky core , Pluto is the largest known object in the belt. Far from the sun, bodies in the Kuiper Belt suffer freezing temperatures. While most planets swept the area around them clean of smaller bodies soon after their formation, Pluto lacked the mass and gravitational force necessary to do so. This is one of the reasons it was demoted to the status of a dwarf planet in