You might guess that a small and distant world almost 40 times farther from the sun than the Earth is from the sun would not have an atmosphere, but in the case of Pluto, you'd be wrong. In fact, Pluto is a complex world, particularly when it comes to weather patterns. Gusty winds, clouds, haze, micro snowflakes and even ice volcanoes — cryovolcanism — could all be part of Pluto's dynamic weather system. While such observations have come from Earth-based telescopes, many more surprises might be revealed as NASA's New Horizons spacecraft makes its nearest approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015.
But no matter how you classify it, this icy and remote dwarf planet is an odd little world.
The supermassive black hole is 40 million times as massive as the sun and powers a quasar that existed 700 million years after the Big Bang.
The asteroid zoomed by Earth at a perfectly safe distance of around 1.8 million miles (2.9 kilometers).
Images show surprise changes to the spacecraft as it interacted with the atmosphere.
