4 READING / Read and write True or False. The planet Pluto was opened in 1930. It was named by an 11-year old girl from England. Since then many people grew up thinking that Pluto was the ninth planet of the Solar System. Its diameter is only 2,372 km. It is so far from earth that the most powerful telescopes could only show Pluto as a grey image in the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper belt is home to hundreds of thousands of icy, rocky objects, many bigger than 100 km across and over 1 trillion or more comets. Since 2006, little Pluto is no longer a main planet but a dwarf planet because of its size. Pluto is the largest dwarf planet discovered so far.
Pluto is smaller than our moon and it is a strange world that has valleys, plains, mountains, and possibly ice. It has five moons and the biggest moon is Charon, which is almost half the size of Pluto. The temperature on its surface is -229 degrees C. It is thanks to the New Horizon spaceship that we have learned so much about Pluto and its hard area. New Horizon also showed that Pluto’s area has mountains as tall as 3,500 m which are close to the size of Earth’s Rocky Mountains in the USA.
One day on Pluto takes about 153 hours. For Pluto it takes 246 earth days to make a full orbit of the sun. Sunlight on Pluto looks like moonlight on Earth.
1) Pluto was known by the scientists before 1930.
2) Pluto was a girl’s name.
3) Pluto’s diameter is more than 2000 km.
4) The Kuiper belt consists of rocks, comets and planets.
5) After 2006 Pluto has been called a dwarf planet.
6) The moon is bigger than Pluto.
7) The New Horizon spaceship discovered Pluto’s area.
8) The sunlight is very bright on Pluto. ​​​