A Rose By Any Another Name…
…would be just as frikkin’ cold. In our time of media punditry bordering on the absolute absurd (see above headline) we do not have the patience to sit around and wait for the IAU to decide what to name the 10th planet in the solar system. And we do not need to, apparently, as the IAU dropped Pluto and the newest planet to the status of dwarf planets. But the planetoid formerly known as “Xena”, the codename given by the discoverers of the Kuiper Belt object, and her small satellite “Gabrielle” has been officially renamed to fit the more IAU-appropriate names “Eris” and “Dysnomia”. Eris is the Greek Goddess of warfare and strife, whilst her daughter Dysnomia (sounds like a disease) is the demon spirit of lawlessness. Eris does sound a tad better than the other option, that being named asteroid number 134340.
Pluto has long been challenged as having planet status, given the fact the Earth’s satellite is itself larger than Pluto. The main opponents to the renaming of Pluto were Americans astronomers, who wanted to defend the only planet discovered by one of their own.
Pluto was discovered in 1930 by a fortunate accident. Calculations which later turned out to be in error had predicted a planet beyond Neptune, based on the motions of Uranus and Neptune. Not knowing of the error, Clyde W. Tombaugh at Lowell Observatory in Arizona did a very careful sky survey which turned up Pluto anyway. After the discovery of Pluto, it was quickly determined that Pluto was too small to account for the discrepancies in the orbits of the other planets. - nineplanets.org
Pluto is instead considered to be one of the icy objects of the Kuiper Belt, an extremely frigid area of the solar system which contains a vast amount of asteroids and comets, some of which swing in toward Earth once every few hundred, thousand, or million years. More than 1,100 objects of considerable size have been discovered floating around in the Kuiper Belt, an estimated half a million bodies comprising of 32km or more in diameter existing below observable range (32km object could devastate Earth in a collision nonetheless). The effect the Kuiper Belt objects have had on the solar system is evident, and could explain the fact why Neptune has been pulled out farther from the sun than it may once have been situated. Neptune also has a strong source of internal heat, despite the fact it is much farther away than the frigid Uranus.
The Kuiper Belt was the main search for Planet “X” years ago, when the rotation of Neptune seemed perturbed by some kind of larger object farther out in the solar system. No such object has ever been discovered, except for the planetesimal matter in the Kuiper belt, and the “dwarf planets” as have been recently classified by the IAU. Mysteries still abound in our own solar system, however, as at a distance of between 7 and 8 billion kilometres from the sun (Pluto is already 6 billion kilometres out) the debris field ends abruptly, perhaps “cleared” by a gravitationally strong object the size of a planet, or a passing star. Nobody knows. The farthest Kuiper Belt object discovered is Sedna, a dwarf planet (perhaps 75% the size of Pluto) that never comes closer than 76 AU (7.4 billion kilometres) to the sun. One thing that is known is that the Kuiper Belt mass is fairly puny. Earth is far heavier than Pluto, Eris, and all the unseen matter in the Kuiper Belt combined. Where all the matter has gone is another mystery, but astronomers pose the theory that many collided and were obliterated. The asteroid belt that exists between Mars and Jupiter, and beyond Neptune, appear to be the “left-over” of plantesimal debris that simply wasn’t thrown in the “melting pot”. The many weird objects captured by Jupiter and Saturn could have also originated from the Kuiper Belt, and the chance for further objects being captured by gravitational giants like Jupiter remains high. Jupiter caught and destroyed the Shoemaker-Levy comet in 1994, causing the object to impact with the planet in a most dramatic fashion.
While Pluto and Eris are not officially planets, and while the popular “Xena” shall no longer be the referring name for that distant object, it changes nothing but the definitions. Pluto has, and will continue to exist at a range of 4.4 to 7.3 billion kilometres for billions of years to come, or in other words, far longer than humans shall likely remain in control of this planet. That we have come to name, argue about, dispute, and protest definitions of an icy body we cannot even see with the strongest telescopic equipment on planet Earth (Pluto, Charon, Eris, Quaoar and others were either discovered using mathematical calculations based on the perturbances of larger observable objects, or by photo imaging over days to detect positional changes of light sources). It is enough to enjoy the idea that these objects exist so far from the grasp of our aided eyes, and yet are not even a stone’s throw into the unknown ocean of the Universe.
The views expressed on this blog are the opinion of the author and should not be taken as fact.