Today marks the 95th anniversary of the discovery of the planet Pluto.
One of the more mysterious heavenly bodies within our solar system,
the planet (or as some claim, "dwarf planet") Pluto was discovered by
American astronomer Clyde William Tombaugh in 1930 during his
time as a researcher at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.
Tombaugh's discovery of what was first called, "Planet X"
made it by far the first known object within the Kuiper Belt,
a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is also the
ninth-largest and tenth-most massive object to directly
orbit the sun and is the largest known trans-Neptunian
object by volume, by a small margin, but is less massive
than Eris, the most massive and second-largest known
dwarf planet in the Solar System.
It is said that at the time of it's discovery, animator Walt Disney
named Mickey Mouse's comical canine companion, Pluto,
in honor of the newly found planet.
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