Pluto May Have an Ocean
Finding an ocean
Exploration of Pluto Timeline
1930: Pluto Discovered by a young astronomer named Clyde W. Tombaugh in the Lowell Observatory
1978: Images released of Pluto’s moon Charon
1988: NASA confirms that Pluto has a thin nitrogen atmosphere (an atmosphere that appears to have expanded rapidly in subsequent decades)
2005: The Hubble Space Telescope distinguishes Pluto from Charon and in doing so discovers that Pluto has more that one moon – raising the number of Plutonian moons to three
2006: Discovery of new “small” planets leads scientists to define Pluto as a dwarf planet, removing it from the list of classical planets
2010: Hubble captures the best “fuzzy” images so far of Pluto
2011: Astronomers discover a fourth Pluto moon
2012: A fifth moon is discovered orbiting Pluto
2015: New Horizons photographs the “new-look” Pluto, and sparks excitement in space explorers to continue studying the dwarf planet