pluto

What Color is Pluto

Pluto's colors are pretty basic.

The tiny planet Pluto is mostly made of ice. Therefore, you might predict the color to be transparent or white like ice or snow. However, Pluto’s color is actually brown. So far, they have found that Pluto has a moon orbiting it named Charon. When Charon passed in front of Pluto, it made the regions of the dwarf planet to go darker. As soon as that happened, astronomers subtracted the light from Pluto to get an approximate guess of Pluto’s color. It was then when the astronomers found out that Pluto had darker and lighter regions when they were expecting a pure snowy ball. Although the color is dull and dirty brown, since it is made of ice, it has a very high reflectiveness.

However, this is just an approximate guess. Pluto is the only planet that was not observed by a spacecraft. With the current technology, they can only observe Pluto from far away with a telescope. However, NASA has announced that they will be sending a spacecraft by 2015 to observe Pluto.