lol guess.
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PSYCH!!
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Care to elaborate? Do you mean that we have a probe on the way (New Horizons, due in 2015), or that its status was changed from planet to dwarf planet, or something else? If you're thinking of the dwarf planet thing, what astronomers did was understandable. Pluto is smaller than the Moon, and its mass is so low that it and its moon actually orbit around each other (the center of their mutual orbit is above the surface of Pluto, whereas for us it's well below the Earth's surface).
Pluto was basically grandfathered in as a planet back when our telescopes weren't too good. But a few years ago astronomers started to find rocks more or less the size of Pluto farther out, which forced them to come up with some kind of definition of what makes a planet. It turns out there was no way to define planet in such a way that would include Pluto but not include a bunch of space rocks we don't consider planets.
Personally I'm glad they came up with a compromise category that still kinda-sorta kept Pluto as a type of planet. I'm also glad they launched New Horizons before Pluto was demoted, because I always thought of it as a planet (I'm probably older than you are, after all) and maybe it might have been canceled if it weren't considered a planet at the time.
Pluto was basically grandfathered in as a planet back when our telescopes weren't too good. But a few years ago astronomers started to find rocks more or less the size of Pluto farther out, which forced them to come up with some kind of definition of what makes a planet. It turns out there was no way to define planet in such a way that would include Pluto but not include a bunch of space rocks we don't consider planets.
Personally I'm glad they came up with a compromise category that still kinda-sorta kept Pluto as a type of planet. I'm also glad they launched New Horizons before Pluto was demoted, because I always thought of it as a planet (I'm probably older than you are, after all) and maybe it might have been canceled if it weren't considered a planet at the time.
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Pluto is an oddity.
It is, and it isn't a planet of this solar system.
The 8 'accepted' planets orbit the sun in the same plane (or very nearly).
Pluto's orbit is inclined to this plane by 17 degrees. So it appears NOT to have been formed in the same process that formed the other 8 planets.
And yet it is gravitationally bound to the outermost planet Neptune making 2 orbits of the sun while Neptune makes 3.
Pluto is thus very much in a stable orbit.
And Neptune, is regarded as having 'cleared its neighborhood' because Pluto is gravitationally bound to it.
The same is not true of Pluto. Pluto has not cleared Neptune from its environment, nor other members of the Kuiper belt.
It is, and it isn't a planet of this solar system.
The 8 'accepted' planets orbit the sun in the same plane (or very nearly).
Pluto's orbit is inclined to this plane by 17 degrees. So it appears NOT to have been formed in the same process that formed the other 8 planets.
And yet it is gravitationally bound to the outermost planet Neptune making 2 orbits of the sun while Neptune makes 3.
Pluto is thus very much in a stable orbit.
And Neptune, is regarded as having 'cleared its neighborhood' because Pluto is gravitationally bound to it.
The same is not true of Pluto. Pluto has not cleared Neptune from its environment, nor other members of the Kuiper belt.
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It's a player's move Shawn!!! :)
For the record everyone, "Did you hear about Pluto? That's messed up right?" is a refrence from the tv show Psych.
For the record everyone, "Did you hear about Pluto? That's messed up right?" is a refrence from the tv show Psych.
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Yep...pretty odd. Buy hey, isn't an asteroid belt object, Ceres, bigger?