Pluto, once considered the ninth and most distant planet from the sun, is now the

largest known dwarf planet in the solar system. It is also one of the largest known
members of the Kuiper Belt, a shadowy disklike zone beyond the orbit of Neptune
thought to be populated by hundreds of thousands of rocky, icy bodies each larger than
62 miles (100 kilometers) across, along with 1 trillion or more comets.
In 2006, Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, a change widely thought of as a
demotion. The question of Pluto's planet status has attracted
controversy and stirred debate in the scientific community, and among
the general public, since then.
American astronomer Percival Lowell first caught hints of Pluto's existence in 1905
from odd deviations he observed in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus, suggesting that
another world's gravity was tugging at these two planets from beyond. Lowell predicted
the mystery planet's location in 1915, but died without finding it. Pluto was finally
discovered in 1930 by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory, based on
predictions by Lowell and other astronomers.
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