Actually, it's red!
Pluto has long been popularly depicted as grayish or blue, though scientists have suspected for decades that the distant dwarf planet has a reddish hue. But because Pluto is millions of miles away, we really didn't know for sure. Now, thanks to photos taken by the unmanned spacecraft New Horizons, we know that Pluto is red.
New Horizons, which has been in transit for nearly a decade, has come closer to Pluto than any manmade material ever has before. In a week, New Horizons will be a mere 7,750 miles from the surface of Pluto. By that time, we'll surely learn a whole lot more about Pluto than just its color. But for now, the color thing is exciting.
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Unlike Mars, which had claim to the "red planet" label first, Pluto's red coloring is likely due to "hydrocarbon molecules that are formed when cosmic rays and solar ultraviolet light interact with methane in Pluto's atmosphere and on its surface," NASA says. Mars is just red from boring old iron oxide.
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