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That’s 10 to 25 kilometers larger than previously estimated.

Size matters, even for dwarf planets. Pluto is now officially bigger than Eris, one of hundreds of thousands of mini-planets and comet-like objects circling beyond Neptune in a region called the Kuiper Belt.

An image captured by the New Horizons spacecraft and rolled out by NASA on Saturday, displays Pluto’s mystifying dark spots, which are regularly spaced apart and around 300 miles across each. The curtain hasn’t been pulled back like this since NASA’s Voyager 2...

Maybe New Horizons will find something so interesting that the powers that be will decide to redefine what makes a “planet” yet again. Just because Pluto is bigger than any other known object in the Kuiper Belt does not mean that it’s the most massive or...

That same year, the New Horizons mission launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a journey of almost 10 years and 4.8 billion kilometers, becoming the first spacecraft to explore this far-away frontier.

Based on Lorri’s reconnaissance, the spacecraft is proceeding on its nominal trajectory, which will take it closer to the dwarf planet than the orbit of Charon, which will be on the opposite side of Pluto during the flyby.

The speed of New Horizon equals that of light and therefore it takes this long duration for the images to reach Earth since the distance between the Earth and the spacecraft is some 4.7 billion kilometres.

NASA and the John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory are expecting better close ups as New Horizons closes in on Pluto after a nine year long odyssey through the Solar System.

As NASA’s New Horizons steadily makes its way to the Pluto system, the spacecraft has confirmed that there is methane on the planet. And so is New Horizons, which will fulfill its destiny when it performs a flyby of Pluto on July 14th.

But nobody knows what the are.

Yes, you guessed correctly; even the most powerful telescopes in the world, including Hubble, don’t do a lot better, because Pluto is smaller than our moon, and a long, long way away. The New Horizons spacecraft will shriek past Pluto at 14km/s, passing roughly 7,750 miles...