Though Pluto has formally been considered a dwarf planet for almost two decades, it still has many lessons left for planetary scientists — including hints about how the solar system formed.

But Pluto turned out to be too tiny — it is smaller than the moon — and was demoted to dwarf planet status in 2006. There are now four other officially recognized dwarf planets, and Cheng ...

A team of scientists spotted evidence of relatively recent ice volcanoes on Pluto, advancing our understanding of the dwarf planet's surface-sculpting activities.

The dwarf planet Makemake, which chills out in the deep freeze of the outer Solar System, might be home to an ice volcano 1. Makemake is one of many icy worlds that orbit the Sun past Neptune.

The dwarf planet's orbit is such an elongated ellipse that it takes around 25,000 years to make one orbit of our sun. At its closest, it sits approximately 6.66 billion kilometers away from the sun.

The dwarf planet Ceres hosts a frozen ocean that is almost pure water ice at its surface and becomes ‘dirtier’ with depth, modelling suggests 1. The work reconciles conflicting evidence ...

More than 15 years after Pluto was demoted to dwarf planet, the debate, even among scientists, continues. Skip to content Skip to site index. Is Pluto a Planet? What’s a Planet, Anyway?

It’s the only planet to be discovered in the United States. 3 Pluto was named the “official state planet” of Arizona even though it is classified as a dwarf planet.

All 19 detections of the dwarf planet 2017 OF201, from August 2011 to October 2018. Credit... Cheng et al., arxiv.org, 2025. By Kenneth Chang.