#3 Pluto - some facts

by auntie_rain on Flickr

Did you know...

In Roman mythology, Pluto is the god of the Underworld.
Pluto is smaller than even our own moon, which is why it is not called a planet any more, it is a "dwarf planet."
Pluto is really really far away. When it is the closest to the sun, Pluto is still 30AU away from it. The earth is 1AU away from the Sun, so imagine going from the Earth to the Sun, then do that 30 times and that's how far away Pluto is. Wow!!

Pluto's name was suggested by an 11 year old girl in Oxford

The name Pluto was proposed by Venetia Burney (later Venetia Phair), an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England. Venetia was interested in classical mythology as well as astronomy, and considered the name, that of the Roman god of the underworld, appropriate for such a presumably dark and cold world. She suggested it in a conversation with her grandfather Falconder Madan, a former librarian at the University of Oxford's Bodleian Library. Madan passed the name to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, who then cabled it to colleagues in the United States

(from wikipedia)

Because Pluto is so far away from us, no spacecraft have reached it yet. So, how did Teddy and I visit Pluto this week?

You'll have to wait a little bit longer to find out, but I can tell you that Pluto is SCRUMPTIOUS!