On 18th of February 1930 US astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto.

The search for what was known as ‘planet X’ had been ongoing for a long time. In 1906 Percival Lowell, who founded the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, launched his project to search for this unknown planet.

It was not until after his death and in 1929 that  Vesto Melvin Slipher, the observatory director, gave the job of locating Planet X to 23-year-old Clyde Tombaugh, who had just arrived at the observatory.

On February 18, 1930, after nearly a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered a possible moving object on photographic plates taken on January 23 and 29. A lesser-quality photograph taken on January 21 helped confirm the movement. After the observatory obtained further confirmatory photographs, news of the discovery was telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory on March 13, 1930.

Pluto was named by 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England.

Pluto is a dwarf planet located in a distant region of our solar system beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto was long considered our ninth planet, but the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006.

NASA’s New Horizons was the first spacecraft to explore Pluto up close, flying by the dwarf planet and its moons in 2015. It found that Pluto is a complex world with mountains, valleys, plains, craters, and apparently even glaciers.