R&R rants and raves

it’s ok Pluto.. im not a planet either!

watched a fascinating national geographic show on the planets, I found the last part on Pluto really interesting.

i learned that pluto is a light pink color, only about 40 degrees from absolute zero, and the reasons its not considered a planet.

Pluto was first discovered in 1930 by Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. He compared plates of images taken of the sky… it basically looked like a little black dots all over a page and his task was to see if any of the little dots moved from plate to plate… a plate was taken about every two weeks. Stars are stationary… Any moving object, like an asteroid, comet or planet, would appear to jump from one photograph to the next.

Instead of being the only planet in its region, like the rest of the Solar System, Pluto and its moons are now known to be just a large example of a collection of objects called the Kuiper Belt. Astronomers estimate that there are at least 70,000 icy objects, with the same composition as Pluto, that measure 100 km across or more in the Kuiper Belt. And according to the new rules, Pluto is not a planet. It’s just another Kuiper Belt object.

Astronomers realized that it was only a matter of time before an object larger than Pluto was discovered in the Kuiper Belt.

And in 2005, Mike Brown and his team dropped the bombshell. Eris’ size is approximately 2,600 km (1,600 miles) across. It also has approximately 25% more mass than Pluto.  Add planets making the total number 12? or less?

In the end, astronomers voted for the controversial decision of demoting Pluto (and Eris) down to the newly created classification of “dwarf planet”.

For an object to be a planet, it needs to meet these three requirements defined by the IAU:

It needs to be in orbit around the Sun – Yes, so maybe Pluto is a planet.

It needs to have enough gravity to pull itself into a spherical shape – Pluto…check

It needs to have “cleared the neighborhood” of its orbit – Uh oh. Here’s the rule breaker. According to this, Pluto is not a planet.

As planets form, they become the dominant gravitational body in their orbit in the Solar System. As they interact with other, smaller objects, they either consume them, or sling them away with their gravity. And until Pluto crashes into many of them and gains mass, it will remain a dwarf planet. Eris suffers from the same problem.

Even though Pluto is a dwarf planet, and no longer officially a planet, it’ll still be a fascinating target for study. And that’s why NASA has sent their New Horizons spacecraft off to visit it. New Horizons will reach Pluto in July 2015, and capture the first close-up images of the (dwarf) planet’s surface.

oooooh a show on the Hubble is starting now :)

**photos are not mine, just amusings i found on google images

** some information pulled from universe today