as for pluto itself, nobody is quite sure how big it is,Pietra Gray Marble, or what it is made of,White Marble Mosaic, what kind ofatmosphere it has, or even what it really is. a lot of astronomers believe it isn’t a planet at all, white marble mosaic ,Carrara Marble Slab, but merely the largest object so far found in a zone of galactic debris known as the kuiperbelt. the kuiper belt was actually theorized by an astronomer named f. c. leonard in 1930,but the name honors gerard kuiper, a dutch native working in america, who expanded theidea. the kuiper belt is the source of what are known as short-period comets—those thatcome past pretty regularly—of which the most famous is halley’s comet. the more reclusivelong-period comets (among them the recent visitors hale-bopp and hyakutake) come fromthe much more distant oort cloud, about which more presently. it is certainly true that pluto doesn’t act much like the other planets. not only is it runty andobscure, but it is so variable in its motions that no one can tell you exactly where pluto will bea century hence. whereas the other planets orbit on more or less the same plane, pluto’sorbital path is tipped (as it were) out of alignment at an angle of seventeen degrees, like thebrim of a hat tilted rakishly on someone’s head. its orbit is so irregular that for substantialperiods on each of its lonely circuits around the sun it is closer to us than neptune is. for most of the 1980s and 1990s, neptune was in fact the solar system’s most far-flung planet. only on february 11,Grey Marble Slab, 1999, did pluto return to the outside lane, there to remain for the next228 years. forustone.com
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