| Quote: |
The Pluto Story
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Pluto is no stranger to controversy. In fact, it's been dogged by disputes ever since its discovery in 1930.
Discovered by Clyde Tombaugh of Arizona's Lowell Observatory, Pluto was classified as a planet because scientists initially believed it was the same size as Earth.
It remained one because for years, it was the only known object in the Kuiper Belt, an enigmatic zone beyond Neptune that's teeming with comets and other planetary objects.
Pluto got an ego boost in 1978 when it was found to have a moon that was later named Charon. The Hubble turned up two more, which this past June were christened Nix and Hydra.
But in the 1990s, more powerful telescopes revealed numerous bodies similar to Pluto in the neighborhood.
New observations also showed that Pluto's orbit was oblong, sending it soaring well above and beyond the main plane of the solar system where Earth and the other seven planets circle the sun.
That prompted some galactic grumbling from astronomers who began openly attacking Pluto's planethood.
At one point, things looked so bad for Pluto, the international union said publicly in 1999 that rumors of Pluto's imminent demise were greatly exaggerated and there were no plans to kick it out of the cosmic club.
A year later, the Hayden Planetarium at New York's American Museum of Natural History was accused of snubbing Pluto by excluding it from a solar system exhibition.
Pluto took another hit after Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology discovered 2003 UB313, a slightly larger Kuiper Belt object. What's the point, some astronomers wondered, in keeping Pluto as a planet?
Its future brightened earlier this year, when NASA sent the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto to get a closer look at the ball of rock and ice. The Hubble has managed to glimpse only its most prominent surface features.
As recently as last week, the IAU -- the official arbiter of heavenly bodies -- met together...
and degraded Pluto's planet status. |
And thats the end of story.
- Justinwell it does make since to declassify a planet if there are larger none-planet objects circling our sun. What really needs to be done though is to set a standard minimum size for a planet, so any future discoveries wont go through all this controversy
Size wouldn't be enough of a measure... It would have to be a conglomeration of:
Size
Orbit shape
Material Composition
Gravity Produced
Shape
Amount of debris in orbital path and entire solar system
Age
Size in relation to other local bodies
Etc...
Added the fact that it is really close to the (somewierd name) Cloud, pluto may be the largest body in it.
| Panthrowzay wrote: |
| Added the fact that it is really close to the (somewierd name) Cloud, pluto may be the largest body in it. |
Would you be referring to the Oort cloud?
If so, I don't consider Pluto part of the Oort cloud...
The Oort cloud is a massive collection of comets and other space debris that orbits the sun. It's a sphere that's surrounds the Sun (and our solar system, but it's almost 1 light-year from the Sun... That's almost 2000 times the distance from the Sun to Pluto and a full quarter of the way from the sun to Proxima Centauri (our nearest neighbor)!
There are some scientists that think that Pluto is a large body formed in the cloud and then pulled (or knocked) into a closer orbit around the sun... I find that unlikely... Scientist also theories that Pluto (and it's largest moon Charon) used to be a moon of Neptune and were pushed out of orbit when Neptune captured Triton (one of it's moons) as it moved between the sun and the Kuiper Belt.
Pluto has 3 moons. Charon is the largest... so large in fact that Pluto and Charon are often considered a binary dwarf planet system. It's the only system in the solar system where the point of equal gravity between the two bodies is outside the primary body.
The system is also unique because both the primary and the slave are tidally locked. The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth - it only shows us one side. The Pluto-Charon system is tidally locked both ways - Charon only shows one side of itself to Pluto and Pluto only shows one side of itself to Charon. That means that half of Pluto ('s hypothetical population) doesn't even know that Charon exists and the other half sees the moon constantly.
