Would pluto ever support human life? Why or why not?
474329
Pluto is far too cold to ever support life.  It is so cold, that when it reaces the more distant parts of it's orbit, it's atmosphere changes from a gas to a liquid and "rains" on the surface.\n\nAlso, there is not enough light to support plant life, the content of the atmosphere (even when it is a gas) is not right for animals to breathe and it's surface (and probably the entire planet) is permamently frozen.\n\nSo humans, in order to live on pluto, would have to use an incredible amout of energy to grow food, maintain a breathable atmosphere (in a biosphere type enviromnet) and provide enough heat in order to survive.\n\nPluto has no known sources of energy, and solar power is out of the question, so nuclear power would be the only viable solution.\n\nIt would be very expensive, and quite difficult to keep a sufficient supply of nutrients and water (although the water could maybe be made on-site) to support human life.
297597
Pluto Water was a trademark for a laxative product which was very popular in the United States in the early 20th century.\n\n"Pluto Spring", French Lick, 1903Pluto Water was bottled in French Lick, Indiana. It was advertised "America's Laxative" with the slogan "When Nature Won't, PLUTO Will". The bottle and many advertisements featured an image of the devil.\n\nLouis Armstrong reported favoring Pluto Water until he switched to Swiss Kriss.\n\nOr did you mean the planet?\n\nIn 1994 the Hubble Space Telescope imaged 85 percent of Pluto's surface, revealing bright and dark areas of startling contrast. Astronomers believe that the bright areas are shifting fields of nitrogen ice and the dark areas are fields of methane ice coloured by interaction with sunlight. Some of the dark areas may also be valleys or fresh impact craters. These images support the theory that extensive ice caps form on Pluto's poles, especially when the planet is farthest from the sun.
825827
read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto\n\npluto is neither a planet nor a comet.\n\npluto does orbit the sun, is ball-shaped, does not have an isolated orbit (a bunch of other similar bodies have similar orbits.), and is not a satellite so it is not a planet.\n\ni have been waiting for this since i was about ten.  i knew that pluto didn't fit the pattern set by the major bodies in the solar system so it was an anomaly.  it just felt "out of place".  now that astronomers have found hundreds of other bodies with similar orbits, classifying "134340 pluto" as a planet is even more irrational.  i feel somewhat satisfied, but i don't know how long this will drag on tho.  this was the right thing to do, believe me.  this does not change anything about pluto or the solar system.  this just corrects the mistake of classifying pluto as a planet initially.\n\nmany astronomers consider pluto and charon to be a binary system, but two small bodies orbit that system.  they are called nix and hydra.\n\nincidentally, "134340 pluto" was never a moon of neptune.  neptune did capture triton. this is why triton has a retrograde orbit.
920049
You say that as if it is a bad thing.  Why not say, should Clinton get credit for Pluto not being a planet.  Personally, I think Clinton has more of an interest in Uranus than Pluto.
86735
Well... Pluto isn't exactly a planet... some people speculate it is... others don't. Yes, another one has been discovered a while ago... I think it was Planet Nebula or something... in the far away galaxy of Cygnus (the constellation that resembles a goose)... You are talking about our solar system... right? I thought as much. In our solar system... there'd be 8 or 9, depending if you call Pluto a planet or not.\n\nEDIT: OK... there was one mass that could be considered a planet found in our solar system. It was called Ceres or something... found between Mars and Jupiter. Pluto may be an asteroid!
565970
because Pluto is meant to be his pet...I mean would u have a dog that is bigger than you???
364063
Chances are, yes.\n\n90% of all solar systems are not in a circle so they can not support life.  Of the 10% that are left what are the odds that another planet is moving around a sun where it's not to hot or too cold. Even in our own little solar system there is only one.\n\nSo, if there is life elsewhere, we will never meet them.
408062
yeah i think they might be because what are the chance that we are the ONLY ones , and the real name for Xena is A20031 i think . but their still not sure if Pluto a planet now but that's for scientist to discover. It's only a matter of time before we go out to another arm of the milky way and find the one planet in that solar system ( were not the only solar system ya know ) that has life.
373101
There is debate over whether Pluto should even be classified as a planet.  It seems out of place with the gas giants of the outer solar system beyond the rock belt.  Also, other similar bodies are being found beyond Pluto that are not being made "planets".  Finally, Pluto has a satellite, or "moon", Charon, which is actually almost as big as Pluto istelf, and orbits very, very close to Pluto.  From Earth, they barely resolve (depending on the quality of the instrument) and appear joined at the hip as it were.  Pluto takes 248 years to orbit the sun.  Since it was discovered in 1930, man has not even observed one of its completed orbits around the sun.  Pluto follows an extremely exaggerated elliptical orbit, which actually crosses paths with the orbit of Neptune.  Thus, sometimes Neptune is the furthest planet from the sun, other times it is Pluto.\n\nUranus rotates about its own axis which is "sideways" (a relative term), at 98 degrees tilt.\n\nNeptune has a Great Dark Spot, which is a storm similar to the Great Red Spot of Jupiter.
234001
This is a tough question...\nIf you mean life as we humans know it then the number is pretty small. - For life we need air,water,warmth and gravity.\nWe need to be near a sun - have oceans and land - the correct rotational axis to promote changes in seasons and lastly, a moon to create the tides.\n\nBut if you mean life as a whole... \nThen any planet that can support it would indeed have it.\nThese are a much larger group. We have even seen existance of life on Mars (microscopic bacteria).\n\nMy belief is that there is more than one Earth like planet ou there. We may even see it someday.\nWe have believed that they would seek us out - I believe we will seek THEM out.
782617
The better question is what about the planets they found farther out in the galaxy than Pluto.  Why don't we know their names, and why aren't they taught in schools?\n\nThey can take away our little Pluto, but not give us any new planets in return? Boo!
136781
Pluto (planet), ninth planet from the Sun and outermost known member of the solar system. Pluto was discovered as the result of a telescopic search inaugurated in 1905 by the American astronomer Percival Lowell, who conjectured the existence of a distant planet beyond Neptune as the cause of slight perturbations (see Orbit) in the motions of Uranus. Continued by members of the Lowell Observatory staff, the search ended successfully in 1930, when the American astronomer Clyde William Tombaugh found Pluto near the position Lowell had predicted. The new planet’s mass, however, seemed insufficient to account for the perturbations of Neptune, and the search for a possible tenth planet continues.\n\nPluto revolves about the Sun once in 247.7 years at an average distance of 5.9 billion km (3.67 billion mi). The orbit is so eccentric that at certain points along its path Pluto is closer to the Sun than is Neptune. No possibility of collision exists, however, because Pluto’s orbit is inclined by more than 17.2° to the plane of the ecliptic and never actually crosses Neptune’s path.\n\nVisible only through large telescopes, Pluto is seen to have a yellowish colour. For many years very little was known about the planet, but in 1978 astronomers discovered a relatively large moon orbiting Pluto at a distance of only about 19,000 km (12,000 mi) and named it Charon. The orbits of Pluto and Charon caused them to pass repeatedly in front of one another from 1985 to 1990, enabling astronomers to determine their sizes fairly accurately. Pluto is 2,284 km (1,420 mi) in diameter, and Charon is 1,192 km (740 mi) in diameter, making them even more like a double-planet system than are the Earth and its moon. Pluto was also found to have a thin atmosphere, probably of methane, exerting a pressure on the planet’s surface that is about 100,000 times weaker than the Earth’s atmospheric pressure at sea level. The atmosphere appears to condense and form polar caps during Pluto’s long winter. The first map of Pluto’s surface was made by the Hubble Space Telescope. It shows vague light and dark regions of unknown origin.\n\nWith a density about twice that of water, Pluto is apparently made of much rockier material than are the other planets of the outer solar system. This may be the result of the kind of cold-temperature/low-pressure chemical combinations that took place during the formation of the planet. Some astronomers have suggested that Pluto may be a former satellite of Neptune, knocked into a separate orbit during the early days of the solar system. Charon would then be an accumulation of the lighter materials resulting from the collision.
9103
Somewhere far out within our galaxy, there is the remains of a massive star, so large it quickly burned up all its hydrogen and helium then collapsed and exploded in a supernova, which is the only way that many of the heavier elements needed by our bodies can be created.  And now it rests as a much smaller neutron star, comprised of densely packed neutrons that would weigh tons by the tablespoon full.\n\nOur bodies contain the elements from past supernovas and we are built using a blueprint contained within our DNA.  Each human cell contains DNA that could be connected and gently stretched out to about one yard length.  All of one's billions of DNA connected together could reach nearly to the planet Pluto and would require light to travel for almost 5 hours to span the length.\n\nWhich do you think is more miraculous, a neutron star or a human body?  That is only part of the profound meaning of life.
667527
Nice links. I would think that Pluto is still a planet. Its mean radius relative to earth's radius is approximately 0.46. So the diameter at equator might be some 3600 miles. By comparison, a satellite like Nereid, which orbits the planet Neptune, is no more than 200 miles in diameter. At its size Pluto must be a planet.\nI am not sure about Sedna. If we think about the 10-th planet, or the "X" planet, it was thought to be three times as massive as Saturn, and nearly six billion miles from the earth. It looks to me that Sedna might not be our 10-th planet. But then again, perhaps we just have to wait and see.
103893
Pluto is officially a planet. Although if it were discovered today it would almost certainly NOT get planet status.\n\nBecause of all the confusion with the recent spate of Kuiper Belt Objects, the International Astronomical Union (they are in charge of naming stuff) declared Pluto a planet for historical reasons.\n\nOf course, for astronomical research it doesn't matter too much what you call it...
757181
The International Astronomical Union decided that Pluto was no longer a planet.  Instead, they decided to classify it as a "dwarf planet" because it has not cleared its orbit of debris.\n\nSee the details below.\n\nRESOLUTION 5A\nThe IAU therefore resolves that "planets" and other bodies in our Solar System, except satellites, be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:\n\n(1) A "planet" [footnote 1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.\n\n(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [footnote 2] , (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.\n\n(3) All other objects [footnote 3] except satellites orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar-System Bodies".\n\n\nFootnote 1: The eight "planets" are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.\n\nFootnote 2: An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.\n\nFootnote 3: These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.\n\nRESOLUTION 6A\nThe IAU further resolves:\n\nPluto is a "dwarf planet" by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto\nhttp://www.iau.org/fileadmin/content/pdfs/Resolution_GA26-5-6.pdf\n\non 24 august 2006, the international astronomical union reclassified pluto.\n\npluto does orbit the sun, is ball-shaped and is not a satellite, but it does not have an isolated orbit (a bunch of other similar bodies have similar orbits.) so it is not a planet.\n\ni have been waiting for this since i was about ten when i learned that pluto didn't fit the pattern set by the major bodies in the solar system so it was an anomaly. it just felt "out of place". now that astronomers have found hundreds of other bodies with similar orbits, classifying "134340 pluto" as a planet is even more irrational. i feel somewhat satisfied, but i don't know how long this will drag on tho. many planetary astronomers are satisfied that the definition is rigorous enuf. i can accept that the definition is flawed, but i can not accept that "134340 pluto" is a planet.\n\nthis was the right thing to do, believe me. this does not change anything about pluto or the solar system. this just corrects the mistake of classifying pluto as a planet initially.\n\nthis same thing happened has happened before.  in 1800, an astronomer found a body orbiting the sun between the orbits of mars and jupiter and thought it was a planet.  astronomers finally stopped classifying them as planets after they found several other bodies with similar orbits, and no one thinks ceres, pallas, juno, and vesta are planets today.\n\nmany astronomers consider pluto and charon to be a binary system, but two small bodies orbit that system. they are called nix and hydra.\n\nincidentally, "134340 pluto" was never a moon of neptune. neptune did capture triton. this is why triton has a retrograde orbit