Why Isn't Poor Old Pluto a Planet Anymore?
Posted: Friday, February 13, 2009
by Russell Shortt
Exploring Ireland
Poor old Pluto, for billions of years it lay unnoticed, out there on it's own, not bothering anyone, content to spin around by it's lonesome. Then in 1930, the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona declared it as a planet. And so Pluto became Pluto, up until then happily anonymous; it was christened by an eleven year old Oxford schoolgirl, Venetia Burney, calling it Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld who was able to make himself invisible. Pluto was now a famous planet, recognisable to school-children - but what a strange planet it was - it was tiny, only coming in at one hundredth the size of earth and is primarily constituted of nitrogen ice - so it is a great chunk of ice, floating out there on its own. Sitting on Pluto, our mighty sun would be simply just another small star amongst the may others. It's orbit of the sun is equally bizarre, unlike every other planet, it does not orbit the sun like all the other planets - circularly but rather elliptically. Horribly, towards the end of the twentieth century, this odd, little planet was considered perhaps to odd and debate raged as to whether it was a planet at all. The Kuiper belt was discovered in 1992 - similar to an asteroid belt but constituted by frozen ices such as methane, ammonia and water. In this Kuiper belt were discovered many objects similar to Pluto, and so if Pluto was allowed into the Planet Club, these others would too and that would never do. So on 24 August, 2006 the International Astronomical Union defined the term 'planet' for the first time and surprise, surprise Pluto didn't make the grade. So as soon as it was promoted to a planet it was demoted, fickle humans eh?
http://www.visitscotlandtours.com
This Article has been viewed 129 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.