Sunday, 24 July 2016


Does the solar system have Pluto, or has it been destroyed?

It has been reclassified. (And re-reclassified). It's best described as a dwarf planet.

Our definition of "planet" is continually changing, based on our discoveries overall. This includes discoveries in other star systems.

As an example, one might call any spherical gas or dust accumulation a planet if it is clearly orbiting a star. But what if it is not spherical but orbits exactly like Earth does? What if another object if perfectly spherical like Jupiter, but orbits a star around its north and south poles, rather than along the ecliptic plane (the star's equator)?

What if we discover two Earth-like planets bound to each other? They would be a binary planetary system, orbiting each other as much as orbit the sun. They could be called planetless moons because their barycenter is far outside themselves!

There is no perfect boundary between planet and non-planet.

We may discover a planet we can't classify as terrestrial (rocky) or Jovian (Jupiter-like giant). Then what?

Can't classify by whether it has moons or not. Pluto has moons but Mercury and Venus do not.

In the case of Pluto, the "International Astronomical Union" (IAU) arbitrarily and unilaterally assigned 3 rules for planethood: must orbit its star, must be massive enough to form a sphere, must have cleared its "neighborhood" of debris.
Those last two items are actually quite vague. Nothing is perfectly spherical because tidal forces and orbital mechanisms make ALL planets oblate spheroids.
"Neighborhood" could mean all bodies that come within a certain distance of an orbit, in which case do we declassify planets with moons? Or in an orbital resonance with asteroids? What about planets with eccentric orbits – because of an eccentric orbit and orbital resonance period, Neptune hasn't cleared Pluto!

One cannot practically classify a planet based on size. It's arbitrary to begin with, and can be a matter of radius or mass or density! Besides, Pluto is NOT even the 9th largest body in our system. It might not even be the 13th! There are several moons larger than Ceres (an asteroid belt object between Mars and Jupiter) and Pluto! The Kuiper Belt might hold many more larger objects than we can detect - that list will change soon because we have a lot of probes and telescopes soon to return data.

So where does that leave us? We're kind of stuck with the definition given by the IAU. Pluto hasn't cleared its orbit, and none of the Kuiper Belt Objects have, either. Ceres hasn't cleared the asteroid belt. Therefore Pluto has been reclassified as a dwarf planet. But there are also conflicting reports that it had been reinstated!



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