“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 ...

It would eventually be named Pluto after the Roman god of the underworld. Despite being smaller than several known moons, it was deemed large enough to be considered a planet. However, it soon ...

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh, an American astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. Cold, dark and distant, it was named after the Roman god of the underworld.