There are 5 Dwarf Planets recognized in our Solar System
The Dwarf Planets are Ceres, Makemake, Haumea, Eris and Pluto.
The dwarf planet Ceres is also the largest asteroid in our solar system, and resides in the asteroid belt, making it the only dwarf planet to not inhabit the outer solar system.
When Pluto was discovered in , it was called the ninth planet in our solar system, but its status as a fully fledged planet came into question in the 1990s. Pluto was officially reclassified as a dwarf planet in .
The best-known dwarf planet, Pluto is also the largest in size and the second largest in mass. Pluto has five moons. The largest, Charon, is over half the size of its host. Pluto's orbit is not circular like those of the other planets and it actually crosses Neptune's orbit, which means that Pluto is sometimes closer to the Sun than Neptune is. It takes Pluto nearly 250 years to complete one trip around the Sun.
Not much was known about Pluto before NASA's New Horizons mission. Launched in , the spacecraft took nearly nine years to reach its target. The mission revealed that Pluto's surface features plains and mountains made of nitrogen ice and water ice.
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