Bad News
The artist formerly known as Pluto has had even more bad news since being downgraded from a planet last year (it now called a "Solar Truck Stop" or maybe a "dwarf planet", we misremember). It seems that the object currently known as Eris (destined to be "plutoed" and known henceforth as "Smedley", we suspect) has been calculated to be both bigger and more massive than the former planet-that-must-not-be-named.
Astronomers have announced yet more bad news for the much-lamented former planet Pluto. Kicked out of the club of planets last year into a new category of dwarf planet, it is not even the biggest of those, scientists have found.
The same object that began Pluto's problems, a 1,500-mile-wide dwarf planet called Eris, has been confirmed as bigger and heavier than Pluto.
Using the Hubble space telescope and the Keck observatory in Hawaii, scientists used measurements of the orbit of Dysnomia, one of the satellites of Eris, to calculate that Eris is 27% heavier than Pluto. "This is sort of Pluto's last stand," said Emily Schaller, of California Institute of Technology, part of the research team that publishes its results today in Science.
Pluto was demoted from planet status at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union last year. The move solved an embarrassing fudge: when astronomers at the Lowell observatory announced the discovery of Pluto in 1930, they claimed it was several times larger than Earth, ensuring that it was quickly labelled the ninth planet. But as it turned out, Pluto was substantially smaller than the moon. At 1,480 miles, its width is no more than the distance from London to Moscow.
When Eris was spotted on the edge of the solar system in 2003, it forced astronomers to rethink their definition of what made a planet. Ian Crawford, of the Centre for Planetary Science and Astrobiology at Birkbeck College, said the latest research showed that the discovery of Pluto had been a lucky accident: rather than a proper planet, he said, Pluto had just been the first object discovered from the Kuiper Belt, a ring of rocks and comets that surrounds the outer solar system. "It goes to show that there's nothing special about Pluto."
We'll always have Pluto. Because people will be forever proving that is was not a planet, nyah, nyah.
By madconductor, Thursday, 14 June , 2007 @ 11:30 pm
Oh my. Save me. Pluto may never have another chance, now. And Eris (such a condescending, arrogant name) will be bandied about for planetdom - after all, it has a “satellite”.
Poor Pluto. I think Walt Disney helped create this mess.
By Chris, Friday, 15 June , 2007 @ 8:09 am
I’m sure we’ll find out later that Eris is merely retaining water, and that “all those meteors went straight to my equator.”