The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

Why is Pluto no longer a planet? (Or is it?)

2019-08-27T17:09:46.213Z


The dwarf planet was also famous for being the only planet discovered in the United States. What happened to Pluto?


  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in a new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in a new window)
  • Click here to share on LinkedIn (Opens in a new window)
  • Click to email a friend (Opens in a new window)

(CNN) - Pluto was long considered the ninth planet of our solar system. Although it is small, it orbits the Sun and has the spherical shape necessary to be considered a planet.

But today marks 13 years since Pluto received a sharp fall in its state, officially called Pluto Depression Day.

Pluto was relegated in 2006 when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) created a new definition for the planets and decided that Pluto did not conform to the law.

But that has not resolved the issue for fans of the distant Pluto.

  • Astronomers found two new planets that could harbor life

The first planetary days of Pluto

The planetary days of Pluto are remembered with love: for decades it was notable for being the smallest and furthest planet in our solar system. It is only half the width of the United States and is located in a distant region of the solar system called the Kuiper Belt, which requires a telescope to be seen.

The dwarf planet was also famous for being the only planet discovered in the United States.

It was discovered in 1930 by astronomer Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona (named after the respected American astronomer Percival Lowell, who believed the Martians dug the channels found on the surface of that planet).

This high resolution image captured by NASA's New Horizons spacecraft shows that Pluto's surface has a remarkable range of subtle colors.

The story behind Pluto's name is also famous.

It was suggested by an 11-year-old girl in England, who was interested in Roman legends and thought that naming the planet frozen by the god of the underworld was intriguing. His grandfather transmitted the idea to a member of the Royal Astronomical Society of the United Kingdom, who then suggested it to his American counterparts at the Lowell Observatory. They ended up agreeing on Pluto's name, possibly because the PL paid tribute to Percival Lowell.

The newly discovered planet, which orbits more than 4,828 million kilometers from the sun, would be known as the "King of the Kuiper Belt."

But how the brave ones have fallen.

1 of 35 | NASA published the clearest images so far on the surface of Pluto. In this image are shown shows the mountainous coast of the Sputnik Planum. "The mountains that border the Sputnik Planum are absolutely wonderful with this resolution," said the member of the New Horizons scientific team. John Spencer

2 of 35 | Many of the craters seen in this image are approximately 155 miles (250 kilometers) wide.

3 of 35 | This image shows how erosion and faults have sculpted Pluto's icy crust in rough wastelands.

4 of 35 | Pluto's largest moon, Charon, seen in color in this image taken by the New Horizons of NASA on July 14, 2015. The image combines blue, red and infrared images to better highlight the moon's surface characteristics. .

5 of 35 | This composition of enhanced color images shows the striking differences between Pluto (bottom right) and its largest moon, Charon (top left).

6 of 35 | This photo shows the variety of Pluto textures, including what NASA calls "rounded mountains with bizarre textures." The mountains are informally called Tartar Dorsa. This image shows about 330 miles (530 kilometers) of Pluto's land. It combines blue, red and infrared images taken by the multispectral Visual camera of the space probe. The images were taken on July 14, 2015, during the overflight of the space probe.

7 of 35 | This photo is a synthesis of new high resolution images downloaded from the New Horizons spacecraft. The extensive glacial plains have been nicknamed Sputnik Planum. This image is seen from a perspective above the equatorial zone of Pluto. Astronomers began downloading data from the spacecraft during the Labor Day weekend, September 5-7, 2015.

8 of 35 | Scientists say that what looks like mountains could be huge blocks of frozen water suspended over frozen nitrogen. In the new photos, taken on July 14, 2015 and published on September 10, 2015, one pixel equals 400 meters (440 yards). The closest passage of the New Horizons ship through Pluto was about 80,467 km from the surface.

9 of 35 | Pluto's landscape has a lot of variety ... plains, mountains, craters and what looks like they could be dunes. The smallest details in the photos are approximately 0.8 km wide. The crater area is old, scientists say. Frozen flat plains are relatively recent.

10 of 35 | Just before its maximum approach to Pluto on July 14, 2015, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft took this photo of Charon, Pluto's largest moon. The photo was taken at a distance of 466,710 km away. The north pole region of Charon is markedly dark. This photo was published on September 10, 2015.

11 of 35 | This new image of Pluto has stunned planetary scientists. It shows the atmosphere of the small world, backlit by the sun.

12 of 35 | Images taken of Pluto's heart-shaped feature, informally called "Tombaugh Regio", reveal a "vast plain without craters that seems to be no more than 100 million years old,"

13 of 35 | Close-up images of a region near the equator of Pluto revealed a giant surprise: a chain of youth mountains. NASA published the image on Wednesday, July 15.

14 of 35 | New notable details of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, are revealed in this image released on July 15.

15 of 35 | The latest spectrum analysis of the Ralph instrument from New Horizons was published on July 15. It reveals a large amount of methane ice, but with surprising differences from one place to another across the frozen surface of Pluto.

16 of 35 | On Tuesday, July 14, members and guests of the NASA team count down for the approach of the spacecraft to Pluto.

17 of 35 | This image of Pluto was captured by the New Horizons spacecraft on Monday, July 13, approximately 16 hours before the time of maximum approach. The spacecraft was 766,048 km from the surface of Pluto.

18 of 35 | The colors in this image of Pluto and Charon have been exaggerated to make it easier to see their different characteristics. (These are not the real colors of Pluto and Charon, and the two bodies really aren't that close in space.)

19 of 35 | This image of Pluto was captured by the New Horizons spacecraft on Sunday, July 12. The spacecraft was 2.7 million km from Pluto at the time.

20 of 35 | New Horizons took this picture of Charon on July 12. This reveals a system of chasms larger than the Grand Canyon. The spacecraft was 2.57 million km away when the image was taken.

21 of 35 | New Horizons was approximately 5.97 million km from Pluto and Charon when he took this picture on Wednesday, July 8.

22 of 35 | Do you see a heart in Pluto? This image was taken on Tuesday, July 7 by the New Horizons spacecraft when it was about 8.05 million km from the planet. Look to the bottom right and you will see a large bright area - around 1,931.21 km in diameter - that resembles a heart.

23 of 35 | New Horizons took six black and white photos of Pluto and Charon between June 23 and 29.

24 of 35 | New Horizons took a series of 13 images of Charon surrounding Pluto within 6 and a half days in April. Pluto is shown here along with Charon in the images taken on June 25 and 27.

25 of 35 | New Horizons took a series of 13 images of Charon surrounding Pluto within 6 and a half days in April.

26 of 35 | Look carefully at the images above: These mark the first time the New Horizons ship has photographed the smallest and barely visible moons of Pluto, Cerberus and Styx

27 of 35 | New Horizons uses its color image sensor to capture this image of Pluto and Charon on April 9.

28 of 35 | In August, New Horizons crossed the orbit of Neptune, the last planet that would pass on its journey to Pluto

29 of 35 | New Horizons captured this image of Jupiter and its volcanic moon, Io, in early 2007.

30 of 35 | On his way to Pluto, New Horizons took these pictures of the four "Galilean moons of Jupiter." From the left you can see: Io, Europe, Ganymede and Callisto.

31 of 35 | A white arrow points to Pluto in this photo taken in September 2006 from the New Horizons. The spacecraft was still about 4.180 million km from Pluto.

32 of 35 | Pluto was discovered in 1930, but it was only a speck of light on the best telescopes on Earth until February 2010, when NASA published this photo.

33 of 35 | This was one of the best views we had of Pluto and its moon Charon before the New Horizons mission.

34 of 35 | An image of Pluto and its moons from the Hubble space telescope. Charon is the largest moon near Pluto. The other four bright spots are smaller moons discovered in 2005, 2011 and 2012: Nix, Hydra, Cerbero and Styx.

35 of 35 | New Horizons was launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on January 19, 2006. The piano-sized probe weighed almost 478.08 kilos at launch.

And then there were eight

Things went downhill for Pluto in 2006, when the IAU redefined what it means to be a planet, stating that a planet must be a celestial body that orbits the sun, round or almost round, and "clears its surroundings" around its orbit . Pluto failed in the third account because its orbit overlaps with Neptune.

The IAU reclassified it as a dwarf planet, and also called it a “Trans-Neptunian Object”, which caused the outrage of schoolchildren, enthusiasts of small planets and the Internet in general.

For many space lovers, Pluto's degradation felt suddenly. But in the academic world of Astronomy, it was a process that began only decades after the discovery of the dwarf planet.

In 1992, astronomers at the Hawaiian University observatory in Mauna Kea discovered a small icy celestial body a little further than the orbit of Neptune. Called Kuiper Belt Object 1992 QBI, the object sparked speculation that Pluto was just one of many planetary-like objects in the Kuiper Belt.

The final blow came in 2003 when the professor of the California Institute of Technology, Mike Brown, discovered Eris, a dwarf planet that actually has a little more mass than Pluto. Astronomers began to suspect that more of these possible planets were floating.

Now Brown is nicknamed "The Man Who Killed Pluto" because instead of giving the planet state to Eris and all the celestial bodies larger than Pluto, the IAU decided to take down Pluto.

New Horizons relaunches the old debate

But the debate about Pluto's state continues.

In 2015, NASA's New Horizons Program flew over Pluto to take close-up photos and measurements of the dwarf planet, ultimately revealing that Pluto is larger than scientists originally thought.

According to NASA, the data collected by the New Horizons flyby "clearly indicated that Pluto and its satellites were much more complex than imagined," prompting space enthusiasts to wonder if they would recover the state of the planet.

Even the principal investigator of the New Horizons spacecraft, planetary scientist Alan Stern, disagreed with the IAU and claimed that Pluto was simply degraded by its distance from the Sun.

"In fact, if you put the Earth where Pluto is, it would be excluded!" Stern told CNN in 2015.

The year before that, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics also entered the debate. After a round table of experts on the definition of planet, they let the audience vote and, of course, the crowd backed the planet Pluto.

And last year there was a new investigation by the Space Institute of the Central University of Florida, which argued that the degradation of Pluto by the IAU "was not valid."

"The definition of the IAU would say that the fundamental object of planetary science, the planet, is supposed to be defined on the basis of a concept that nobody uses in its research," said UNC planetary scientist Philip Metzger in a statement .

Metzger and his team analyzed more than 200 years of research and found only one study that used the orbit cleaning standard that the IAU used to degrade Pluto.

"It is a careless definition," Metzger added. “They didn't say what they wanted to say by clearing their orbit. If you take that literally, then there are no planets, because no planet clears its orbit. ”

1 of 6 | 'New Horizons' took on July 14 an image of a new mountain range in Pluto near the margin of the Tombaugh Region, located in a crater terrain.

2 of 6 | Within the heart-shaped surface of Pluto - called Tombaugh Regio - lies a vast plain of less than 100 million years.

3 of 6 | This image taken on Wednesday July 15 shows a region of Pluto that reveals a mountainous region that reaches up to 3,500 meters high.

4 of 6 | On July 8 the ship captured an image of the dwarf planet where a bright heart-shaped area is observed.

5 of 6 | In NASA photography you can see the mountainous system in the Tombaugh region.

6 of 6 | The mission took about 9 years and had to travel more than 3,000 million kilometers to reach.

Too great for school

When Pluto was degraded, it caused a wave of reprints of science textbooks to ensure that students of the new millennium were taught that Pluto is a dwarf planet.

But it could still be said that it is the (not) coolest planet to learn, literally speaking.

Pluto has an ice sheet, dunes made of solid methane ice and snow-covered methane peaks (but the snow is red instead of a fluffy white). It also houses the largest known glacier in the solar system.

In fact, Pluto is so cold that its temperature is around 204.4 degrees Celsius below zero, and it becomes even colder as it orbits further from the Sun. Generally, Pluto is so far from the Sun that the light Solar is as bright as a full moon on Earth. From the surface of Pluto, the Sun simply looks like a bright star.

Perhaps the undeniable coldness of Pluto is the reason why people are still intrigued by their categorization 13 years later.

"The complexity of Pluto's system, from its geology to its satellite system and its atmosphere, has been beyond our wildest imagination," Stern said in a NASA statement. "In all the places we turn to there are new mysteries."

astronomy pluto solar system

Source: cnnespanol

All news articles on 2019-08-27

You may like

News/Politics 2024-02-21T13:43:48.582Z

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.