Pluto is a blurry smudge and always will be
The core idea stands, but key numbers or details have changed.
TaughtPluto is too small and too far for us to see any detail. The best image is a handful of fuzzy pixels from Hubble.
NowNASA's New Horizons flew past Pluto in July 2015 and returned sharp images of nitrogen glaciers, water-ice mountains, and a haze-layered atmosphere.
What actually happened
Every planetary science textbook printed before 2015 illustrated Pluto with the same thing: an orange-brown blob assembled from Hubble data, about as informative as a thumbprint. There was no alternative.
New Horizons launched in 2006, the same year Pluto was reclassified, and reached it after a nine-and-a-half-year, three-billion-mile cruise. It found a world far more active than anyone expected for something that cold: a vast plain of nitrogen ice called Sputnik Planitia with convection cells resurfacing it, mountains of water ice several kilometers high, and evidence of a possible subsurface ocean.
The scientific point is that "small and far away" turned out not to mean "geologically dead." The human point is that if you graduated before 2015, the picture in your head of Pluto is probably still the blob.
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Sources
- NASA: New Horizons missionscience.nasa.gov
- NASA Science: Pluto in depthscience.nasa.gov
Who was taught this
Still standard through 2015, so anyone who finished school between 1950 and 2015 learned the earlier version.