Mike Brown, California Institute of Technology astronomer and self-proclaimed Pluto killer, uttered these words exactly nine years ago today after the International Astronomers Union (IAU) officially ...

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - The spotlight is bright enough to thaw even Pluto. Well, not quite, but the tiny, icy world is getting front-page, prime-time attention for its first visit by a spacecraft ...

On the 23rd and 24th of January, 1930, a young astronomer working in Flagstaff, Arizona, scanned a small patch of the night sky. He was taking pictures of star positions, looking for anomalies that ...

Pluto is a weird little world with a familiar planetary recipe. If you combine many of the materials found in the solar system -- rocks, water, methane, nitrogen, carbon-monoxide -- and assemble them ...

It’s time to stop throwing pity parties for Pluto. The beloved not-quite-planet is about to become the star of our solar system. I’ll go out on a limb and predict that in July 2015, the up-close ...

Soon, some of the mystery surrounding Pluto, the distant dwarf planet, will be lifted. NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, speeding through space for almost a decade on a mission to capture a myriad of ...

Pluto’s back, baby! Seventeen years after it was demoted from planet to dwarf planet, it is time for Pluto to retake its former title…at least according to our hosts, Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane. In ...

Michael Brown doesn’t care how much you love Pluto. He loves it too, but that didn’t stop him from leading the charge in 2006 to strip it of its “planet” designation and bust it down to a mere dwarf ...

This story appears in the July 2015 issue of National Geographic magazine. Small, cold, and absurdly far away, Pluto has always been selfish with its secrets. Since its discovery in 1930, the dwarf ...