With a radius of 715 miles (1,151 kilometers), Pluto is about 1/6 the width of Earth. If Earth was the size of a nickel, Pluto would be about as big as a popcorn kernel. From an average distance of 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers), Pluto is 39 astronomical units away from the Sun. One astronomical unit (abbreviated as AU), is the distance from the sun to Earth. From this distance, it takes sunlight 5.5 hours to travel from the Sun to Pluto. If you were to stand on the surface of Pluto at noon, the sun would be 1/900 the brightness it is here on earth or about 300 times as bright as our full moon. There is a moment each day near sunset here on earth when the light is the same brightness as midday on Pluto. Find out when you can experience "Pluto time" where you live. …show more content…
Pluto's 248-year-long, oval-shaped orbit can take it as far as 49.3 astronomical units (AU) from the sun and as close as 30 AU. (One AU is the mean distance between Earth and the sun: about 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.) However, on average, Pluto is 3.7 billion miles (5.9 billion kilometers) away from the Sun or 39 AU. From 1979 to 1999, Pluto was near perihelion, when it is closest to the sun. During this time, Pluto was actually closer to the sun than Neptune. One day on Pluto takes about 153 hours. Its axis of rotation is tilted 57 degrees with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun, so it spins almost on its side. Pluto also exhibits a retrograde rotation; spinning from east to west like Venus and