Pluto: dwarf planet Concepts

How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming

by Mike Brown · 7 Dec 2010 · 242pp · 81,209 words

trademark of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Brown, Mike. How I killed Pluto and why it had it coming / Mike Brown. p. cm. eISBN: 978-0-385-53109-2 1. Pluto (Dwarf planet). 2. Planets. 3. Solar system. 4. Discoveries in science— Anecdotes. I. Title. QB701.B77 2010

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had to tell Diane: The astronomers did the right thing. Xena is not really gone, of course. It is now actually the largest of the dwarf planets, which it rightfully deserves to be. Lilah will probably not learn about Xena in school, but someday, we’ll tell her that when she

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It even included a footnote that clearly stated, “The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,” and that Pluto and Xena, along with the asteroid Ceres, were to be called “dwarf planets,” a term no one had ever heard before. The resolution was clear to point out that

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dwarf planets are not planets, which I found an odd use of the English language. The first question from the press: “Dwarf planets are planets, right?” No, I explained.

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The resolution was pretty clear. There are eight planets; dwarf planets, of which there might be hundreds, were clearly not planets. But how could something be called a

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dwarf planet yet not be a planet? they wanted to know. A blue planet is a planet, right? A giant

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planet is still a planet. A dwarf tree is still a tree. How can a dwarf planet not be a planet? Such is the beauty and frustration of definitions, I suppose. But I agreed that it seemed a poor choice, and an

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Resolution 5B: Definition of Classical Planet Huh? “Classical” planet? It was the Pluto escape clause! Resolution 5B simply changed the word planets in the previous resolution to classical planets. There would now be eight classical planets and four dwarf planets. With the quick addition of one word—classical—in front, dwarf and classical

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different but equal subsets of the overall category of planets. Suddenly, dwarf planets were planets after all. The committee had indeed tried to sneak Pluto back in. The odd phrase dwarf planet had been invented in the previous resolution to allow the possibility that Pluto could rise from the underworld to live again. Like the previous

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a microphone. Here are some excerpts from the scientific debate of the learned astronomers: Resolution 5A, Section 2 starts “a dwarf planet.” Could you put dwarf planet in inverted commas, put quotation marks around dwarf planet? It is a definition. It should be in quotation marks. The press assembled with me chuckled. At the beginning of

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think of a new word which doesn’t exist in the dictionary so that it doesn’t have any baggage, and instead of calling it “dwarf planet,” use some word, since it’s an entirely new thing.… What you need is a new word rather than combination of old words; but

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a planet is a planet and so is a dwarf planet from a schoolmaster point of view. I was feeling punchy and kept interjecting. “Yeah, he is right,” I muttered. “ ‘Dwarf planet’ is a dumb phrase. For years we’ve called things like Pluto and Xena ‘planetoids’—planetlike. That was a perfectly good word

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yesterday. But they’re trying to be sneaky, they are. ‘Dwarf planet’ is dumb, but they need it so Pluto can become a planet with 5B.” The press at this point began to think that I was perhaps as crazy as all of

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as it remains a satellite, it’s out with this resolution.” Comment: “A point of clarification for me: Is a dwarf planet considered a planet?” “That is Resolution 5B.” “In 5A a dwarf planet is not a planet?” “Right.” In perhaps my favorite exchange of the very early morning, the question “Do I

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hour before, mercifully, someone called for a vote. Those in favor of Resolution 5A, which would create eight planets and an unspecified number of dwarf planets, were asked to hold a yellow voting card in the air. The room was filled with the color of the sun. There was no need

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the moment, right now, having passed resolution 5A, we have planets, the eight that are named [points to beach ball], we have dwarf planets [points to stuffed Pluto], and we have small astronomical bodies that are non-spherical. If we reject everything else this afternoon that is what will stand. If, however,

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we are doing is creating an umbrella category called planets under which the classical planets and the dwarf planets fit. And if we do this then that [pulls out umbrella, puts beach ball and stuffed Pluto under it; audience erupts into applause] pertains. “Who is that?” someone in the press asked me.

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They will tell you why. Listen carefully. The word planet is being restricted to just one narrow point of view. Their restriction means that a dwarf planet is not a planet. It would be like saying a dwarf star is not a star. We can fix this. Will we have too many

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planets? Will we confuse the public? No. The distinction is as simple as an umbrella. Pluto is a planet, but it is in the dwarf planet category. So please pass 5B. The word planet must be shared. I almost felt bad enough to want to give in

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. I didn’t object to dwarf planets being considered planets, which was all he was talking about. But I did object to the other planets being termed “classical planets.” For the anti

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the definition that was agreed by consensus at the meeting on Tuesday. There it was made clear that 3 distinct categories were being defined. Planet, dwarf planet, and small solar system body. The amendment [5B] proposes to insert the word “classical” in front of the word planet. It is inconsistent with

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I wouldn’t have minded if there were “major planets” and “dwarf planets” instead of “classical planets” and “dwarf planets.” I guess my own version of pickiness was just as bad as anyone else’s. The vote was called. If the resolution passed, Pluto would be a planet again, and Xena would officially be part

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nine-planet memorabilia. Early on she learned to figure out which one of the nine little circles on whatever picture she had was Pluto and then promptly declare, “Pluto is a dwarf dog.” The continued laughs from that line were more reinforcement than I could possibly have given. Another friend was

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planets?’ She’ll look at me, shake her head, and say, ‘You know, adults are so stupid.’ ” • • • Now that Xena, too, was officially called a dwarf planet, it finally got a real name. The possibilities were wide open, but Chad, David, and I had decided that because—at least in our minds

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had correctly predicted my sister’s pregnancy, whether or not there was some sort of cosmic force governing the stars and planets and even the dwarf planets after all. Maybe there was some sort of fate that had kept this name free until now, the perfect time for it to be

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crazy thoughts now and then. I quickly e-mailed Chad and David, and we all agreed: the largest dwarf planet, temporarily nicknamed Xena, cause of the largest astronomical showdown in generations and the killer of Pluto, would henceforth be called Eris, after the Greek goddess of discord and strife. I love the myth

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make the most sense. Particularly amusing to me was the complaint about the phrase dwarf planet. By the simple rules of grammar, a dwarf planet is a planet, they would say. The fact that the IAU would say that a dwarf planet is not a planet demonstrates that the entire decision must be wrong. What

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no one making these arguments remembers—or admits to remembering—is that the only people who liked the phrase dwarf planet at first were the ones who hoped that it would save Pluto when the other planets were renamed “classical planets.” Yet Resolution 5B was a specific vote on this issue, and

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it clearly stated that dwarf planets are not planets—just as Matchbox cars are not cars, stuffed animals are not animals, and

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chocolate bunnies are not bunnies. I don’t particularly like the phrase dwarf planet, either, but it is serviceable. I’ve heard the argument that the definition is unworkable because it is inconsistent with the rest of astronomy. Nowhere

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this time, I was almost able to laugh about the whole incident. But they were really back. After the IAU decided to call round things dwarf planets, Easterbunny and Santa were eligible for real names, too, and the Spanish astronomers quickly submitted a name for Santa—because, of course, the discoverers

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custom made for this object. The goddess Haumea gave birth to her many children by breaking them off from parts of her body. Santa the dwarf planet also had many children throughout the solar system that had broken off from its body. It seemed a perfect fit. And whatever the name

Chasing New Horizons: Inside the Epic First Mission to Pluto

by Alan Stern and David Grinspoon · 2 May 2018 · 323pp · 94,156 words

with Neptune’s planet-size moon, Triton? Are they really twins left over from an early massive population of icy dwarf planets? Is Pluto’s surface composition as varied as its surface markings seem to indicate? Is it really made out of completely different materials in different areas? How

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stars in coming years. Many planetary scientists had long been referring to the rich harvest of newly discovered small planets in the Kuiper Belt as “dwarf planets,” a term Alan coined in a 1991 research paper mathematically calculating that the solar system might contain as many as one thousand of them. He

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chose the term “dwarf planet” in analogy to the well accepted astronomical term “dwarf stars,” like the Sun, that are the most common type of stars in the universe.

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large enough for gravity to make round but not so massive that it ignites in nuclear fusion to become a star. In this scheme, dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt were recognized as a new class of small planets in line with what many planetary scientists thought. But what happened next

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considered one drafted by their own planet definition committee. Unfortunately, the definition that they voted on was sloppy, awkward, and inelegant, and resulted in Pluto and all dwarf planets, along with all the planets around other stars, being cast out. The hastily arranged voting process the IAU used that day has since nearly

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Marsden’s group at the end of the IAU’s resolution was the vindictive and linguistically nonsensical statement “A dwarf planet is not a planet.” With that, Marsden had accomplished his longstanding goal: Pluto would no longer be a planet in the eyes of astronomers, or in astronomy texts, and Clyde Tombaugh’s

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They’re not the experts in this.”), to bemused, to annoyed, to seriously pissed off. As Fran Bagenal succinctly put it, “Dwarf people are people. Dwarf planets are planets. End of argument.” Many planetary scientists found it particularly annoying that mainstream press outlets seemed to report the reclassification as a fait accompli

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all, larger than any other of the small planets in the Kuiper Belt, laying to rest the hope by some that dwarf planet Eris was larger than Pluto. As to those hoping Pluto was the second-largest body in the Kuiper Belt, Alan declared to the combined in-person and broadcast audience, “Well,

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of Planetary Sciences Drake, Mike Durda, Dan Elachi, Charles Emmart, Carter Enceladus (Saturn moon) Encounter Change Control Board (ECCB), New Horizons Encounter Mode, Pluto flyby EPA Eris (dwarf planet) Eros asteroid Esposito, Larry Europa (Jupiter moon) conditions for life on Facebook fail-safe data plan, New Horizons “Faith of the Heart” (song)

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David Grinspoon. Description: New York: Picador, [2018] | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017060114 | ISBN 9781250098962 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781250098986 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Space flight to Pluto. | New Horizons (Spacecraft) | Pluto probes. | Pluto (Dwarf planet)—Exploration. Classification: LCC TL799.P59 S74 2018 | DDC 629.43/54922—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060114 Our ebooks

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

by Ozan Varol · 13 Apr 2020 · 389pp · 112,319 words

/jun/15/spaceexploration.starsgalaxiesandplanets; David A. Weintraub, Is Pluto a Planet? A Historical Journey through the Solar System (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2014), 144. 54. NASA, “Eris,” NASA Science, https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/planets/dwarf-planets/eris/in-depth

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, August 24, 2006, www.space.com/2791-pluto-demoted-longer-planet-highly-controversial-definition.html. 57. A. Pawlowski, “What’s a Planet? Debate over Pluto Rages On,” CNN, August 24, 2009, www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.dwarf.planet/index.html. 58. American Dialect Society, “‘Plutoed’ Voted 2006 Word of the Year,” January

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York Times, January 20, 2015, www.nytimes.com/2015/01/20/science/a-new-planet-mnemonic-pluto-dwarf-planets.html. 60. ABC7, “Pluto Is a Planet Again—At Least in Illinois,” ABC7 Eyewitness News, March 6, 2009, https://abc7chicago.com/archive/6695131. 61. Laurence A. Marschall

The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets

by Alan Boss · 3 Feb 2009 · 221pp · 61,146 words

: pulsar timing, Doppler shifts, transits, and microlensing. Fritz Benedict of the University of Texas and his colleagues had been able to detect the first M dwarf planet found by Doppler spectroscopy (Gliese 876 b) by using Hubble to measure the star’s astrometric wobble. But Hubble time was too precious to allow

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3 to 1. General applause arose once Resolution 5B was pronounced dead on arrival. Pluto was no longer a planet after that second vote. Now there were only eight. Resolution 6A proposed that Pluto should be called a “dwarf planet,” and this resolution passed by a vote of 237 to 157. Resolution 6B said

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that dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt should be called “plutonian objects.” Plutonian objects? “Plutonian objects” was offered

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the Plutons. Resolution 6B failed on the closest vote of the four: 183 for to 186 against. Pluto was now a dwarf planet. As soon as the final vote was cast in Prague, my office telephone began to ring. I had been watching the vote through streaming live

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Janeiro, Brazil. Ceres had been provisionally promoted to full planethood for a little over a week in Prague, but now Ceres was merely a dwarf planet, along with Pluto and several others, while Vesta remained a lowly minor planet. It was an outrageous turn of events for the Dawn Mission team. September 13

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, 2006—If Pluto was now a dwarf planet, so was Xena. Michael Brown was thus free to suggest proper names for Xena and Gabrielle. He suggested Eris and Dysnomia. Eris was

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the number 134340 on the Minor Planet Center’s list of Solar System non-planets, and Pluto was assigned 136199—numbers that look like those held up by criminals in their mug shots. Pluto had entered the dwarf planet penitentiary with a life sentence, no doubt hoping to be sprung after the next IAU

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remaining business from the 2006 vote in Prague to demote Pluto from planethood to a new category of dwarf planets. Henceforth, Pluto and Eris would be officially known as plutoids, the IAU name for dwarf planets in the outer solar system. Ceres would remain as simply a dwarf planet, with no further laurels for its résumé. June 12

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by See also Doppler spectroscopy; Microlensing; Pulsar timing; Transits Doppler spectroscopy . See also Doppler effect Doppler-Fizeau effect Double planet system Draper, Henry Dressler, Alan Dwarf planets Dwarf stars . See also G dwarf stars; M dwarf stars; Red dwarf stars Dysnomia(photo) Earth-like planets formation of See also Terrestrial planets Ebel

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Lewinsky, Monica Lick Observatory (Mount Hamilton, California) Light detection, from extrasolar planets Lin, Douglas Livesay, Leslie Lowell, Percival Lowell Observatory (Flagstaff, Arizona) M dwarf planets Pluto as See also Dwarf planets M dwarf stars and eccentric planets See also Dwarf stars Maran, Stephen Marburger, John Marcy, Geoffrey Marr, Jim Mars life on Mars Exploration Program

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) definition of formation of habitable, origin of life on intelligent life on major classes of methods for discovering and roundness criterion Plate measurement Pluto(photo) as dwarf planet (see also Dwarf planets) as plutoid Plutoids Plutonian objects Plutons Pollution. See Planetary pollution Proplyds. See Protoplanetary disks Protoplanetary disks (proplyds) Protoplanets. See also Gas giant protoplanets

Fire and Ice: The Volcanoes of the Solar System

by Natalie Starkey · 29 Sep 2021 · 309pp · 97,320 words

being the ninth planet in the Solar System at the time of launch in 2006, before being demoted the same year to dwarf planet, we still knew so little about Pluto. The theory was that the planet was probably just cold and dead, thanks to its vast distance from the Sun and small

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made of methane ice, glaciers of nitrogen flowing down slopes, and a lack of craters. There is no solid rock on the surface of the dwarf planet, yet it appears to have features just like our own rocky planet because its ‘bedrock’ of ice acts in a similar way to rock on

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In fact, the smooth and craterless portions of Pluto’s surface allowed scientists to quickly conclude that the surface of this tiny world was potentially less than 10 million years old – an infant on geological timescales. Suddenly scientists were realising that this now dwarf planet was active in the geologically recent past and

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complete surprise for scientists, who were left puzzled yet excited by the implications. For this frozen dwarf planet to host such a youthful surface requires that it must have some source of internal heat. The problem is, Pluto is very small – being just two-thirds the diameter of our Moon – and so would

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enter the inner Solar System and transit close to the Sun every now and again, but it is also home to the dwarf planet Pluto. While Triton is a little larger than Pluto, it is of a similar composition, and the two may be related way back, billions of years ago, originating from the

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will learn more about what is going on under the seemingly inhospitable icy crust. The furthest: Pluto No discussion of ice worlds would be complete without a visit to the Kuiper Belt, home to the dwarf planet Pluto and its lesser-known moons, of which there are five: Styx, Nix, Kerberos, Hydra and

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known that Pluto was different from many of the other Kuiper Belt objects, being large enough to once be classed as a planet. Of course, now we know that while it is still the largest object in the Kuiper Belt, it is not the only large object out there. Other dwarf planets such

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lost to space on short timescales. Within the nitrogen ice of Sputnik Planitia there exist some clear signs that heat escapes from Pluto’s interior, providing further evidence that the dwarf planet is warm enough to theoretically fuel cryovolcanoes. The features of interest are kilometre-wide, hexagon-shaped ‘cells’ within the broad,

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could even be active today. Ceres is the largest object in the asteroid belt, and thanks to its size it is also classified as a dwarf planet, the only one in the inner Solar System. In fact, Ceres is so large that it has managed to form itself into a sphere,

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cyanobacteria here Dawn mission (NASA) here, here diamonds here diapirs here diatremes here Dione here Doom Mons, Titan here Dragonfly mission (NASA) here dwarf planets here, here; see also Pluto Earth asthenosphere here atmosphere here, here, here composition here core here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here crusts here,

The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission

by Jim Bell · 24 Feb 2015 · 310pp · 89,653 words

with its possible cousin Triton, my bet is that the Pluto system overall will turn out to be just as new, strange, and alien as every other place that we’ve encountered in our travels out into the solar system. Planets, dwarf planets, moons . . . it really doesn’t matter what we call them

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and asteroids and comets (as well as craters and mountains on those worlds) their names—decided to strip Pluto, and other places like it, of their “planet” status. Instead, such worlds were demoted to “dwarf planet” status, and the number of true planets in the solar system was decreased to eight, throwing textbooks

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numbers and the diversity of planetary characteristics within our cosmic neighborhood rather than splitting them up into categories implying substandard status, such as “moon” or “dwarf planet.” I’m a lumper rather than a splitter. SOLAR WIND Although astronomers and planetary scientists don’t yet know exactly how far toward the nearest

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the controversy over the demotion of Pluto, see Neil deGrasse Tyson, The Pluto Files (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009); Mike Brown, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2012); and the details about the IAU’s decision to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status, online at iau.org

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, 85, 86, 87, 89, 91 Drake equation, 78 Dreier, Casey, 253 Druyan, Ann, 83, 85 DSN. See Deep Space Network (DSN) Dunham, Edward “Ted,” 184 Dwarf planets, 242–243 Dwarf stars, 280–281 Dysnomia, 242 Earth atmosphere, 139 characteristics of, 223–225 magnetic field, 171 photographs of, 225–231, 236–239 Earthrise

Strange New Worlds: The Search for Alien Planets and Life Beyond Our Solar System

by Ray Jayawardhana · 3 Feb 2011 · 257pp · 66,480 words

, contain a type of feldspar rich in sodium. Given their sodium feldspar concentration levels, scientists have concluded that the chunks came from a smashed-up dwarf planet. Collisions among such bodies must have been common during the planet-building epoch, and fragments like these give us glimpses of their long-vanished parents

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that span the mass gap between stars and planets. They are probably born like stars but end up with characteristics similar to Jupiter. Just as Pluto’s counterparts did at the low-mass end, brown dwarfs are challenging our defnition of what constitutes a planet at the high end. But there

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a planet for more than seventy-fve years, is no longer. In fact, the IAU made it explicit: Pluto is a dwarf planet by the above defnition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects. The reactions to this apparent demotion ranged

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of Neptune (i.e., 30–55 AU from the Sun) that contains tens of thousands of small bodies, as well as a handful of known dwarf planets like Pluto, left over from the era of solar system formation. Light-year: The distance that light travels in a year, just under 10 trillion kilometers

The Mission: A True Story

by David W. Brown · 26 Jan 2021

unknown unknown. The Discovery line allowed NASA to cast its net wide across the solar system with minimum investment. Each spacecraft opened doors. At the dwarf planet Ceres, for example, the Dawn spacecraft found hydrated minerals consistent with an ancient ocean sitting on its surface. Where did that ocean go? Was liquid

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-go-round happened to stop with an aerospace engineer named Keyur Patel, who was previously project manager on the Discovery-class Dawn mission to the dwarf planet Ceres. He had been with the lab for twenty-three years by then—about as long as Karla—and the two had history. Karla didn

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. Brian next worked on the Dawn spacecraft, which would fly to Vesta and then to Ceres. It would be the first spacecraft to visit a dwarf planet (Ceres), and the first to enter orbit around two separate objects. Brian was the project verification and validation engineer on that one. He made sure

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations

by Clay Shirky · 28 Feb 2008 · 313pp · 95,077 words

volume would be useless if Wikipedia articles weren’t any good, however. By way of example, the article on Pluto as of May 2007 begins:Pluto, also designated 134340 Pluto, is the second-largest known dwarf planet in the Solar System and the tenth-largest body observed directly orbiting the Sun. Originally considered a planet

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planet or to relegate it to another category; as the debate went on, Wikipedia’s Pluto page was updated to reflect the controversy, and once Pluto was demoted to the status of “dwarf planet,” the Pluto entry was updated to reflect that almost immediately. A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as

Wireless

by Charles Stross · 7 Jul 2009

dismantled Ceres, used its mass to build a myriad of solar-sail-powered flyers. Now a river of steerable rocks with the mass of a dwarf planet loops down through the inner system, converting solar energy into momentum and transferring it to the Earth through millions of repeated flybys. Already, Earth has