Pluto

Planet XThe hunt for me.... "Pluto" began in 1905 when Percival Lowell (of Martian Canal infamy) hypothesized about the possibility of a Planet X in the outer solar system.Lowell died before Pluto was discovered. Clyde Tombaugh found it on Feb. 18, 1930 in a concerted scan of the sky. Tombaugh compared two photographs taken at the Lowell Observatory and noted the object's movement against the background of stars.Most of Pluto's orbit is out beyond that of Neptune. But the path is oblong, so Pluto spends part of its 248-year orbit -- the time it takes to make one circle around the Sun -- inside the track of Neptune.Pluto's path is also extremely inclined, by 17.1 degrees, to the main plane of the solar system where the other planets travel.Asteroids also circle the Sun in the solar system's main plane. So do some comets. But many comets, like Pluto, have highly inclined orbits. This similarity, plus Pluto's small size -- smaller than Earth's Moon -- has led many astronomers to conclude that Pluto has been improperly classified all along. It is not a planet, they say, but rather a Kuiper Belt Object, a member of a swarm of comet-like objects beyond Neptune."You start to see where Pluto fits in better with Kuiper objects,'' says Hal Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory and project scientist on NASA's New Horizons mission, planned to launch next year en route to the ninth planet.Secretive worldBeing far away and small, Pluto is a mere point of light in most telescopes. So it gives up its secrets grudgingly. But high-powered telescopes have in recent years probed some of Pluto's mysteries.I am a cold and distant planet that no one loves :-( please be my friend!!!