Some of us remember August 24, 2006 like it was yesterday. That was the day Pluto was booted from the exclusive “planet club”.
I (Sarah) was 11 years old, and my entire class started our lunch break by enthusiastically chanting “Pluto is a planet” in protest of the information we had just received. It was a moving exhibit. At the time, 11-year-old me was furious and even felt somewhat inconsolable. Now, much older, I wholeheartedly accept that Pluto is not a planet.
Like Sarah, I (Rebecca) vividly remember Pluto being redesignated to dwarf status. For me, it wasn’t so much that the objects were reclassified. After all, that’s science, and new knowledge changes things. Rather, I was interested in how the astronomy community approaches PR.
Even a popular astronomer known for his public persona stumbled with an explanation that was largely unflattering. It was a missed opportunity. What was poorly passed off as a demotion was actually the discovery of a new and exciting member of the solar system, the first of which was Pluto.
The good news is that astronomers now have a lot of media support, and there’s a lot of great science to catch up on. Let’s take a look at what you may have missed.
A shocking return to relegation The day Eris was discovered in 2005, Pluto’s fate was all but sealed. Eris, like Pluto, orbits the outskirts of our solar system. It has a smaller radius than Pluto, but more mass.
Astronomers concluded that discoveries of objects like Pluto and Eris will become more common as telescopes become more powerful. they were right. There are currently five known dwarf planets in our solar system.
The criteria for classifying a planet as a “planet” rather than a “dwarf planet” were set by the International Astronomical Union. To make a long story short, Pluto was not a target in 2006. Pluto did not meet all three of her criteria for a fully functioning planet. 1. It must be orbiting a star (the equivalent of the Sun in our solar system). 2. It must be large enough to be forced into a spherical shape by gravity. 3. It must be large enough to displace other objects of similar size near its orbit by its own gravity.
The third criterion was the collapse of Pluto. It does not exclude other objects from adjacent areas.
So is our solar system destined to have only eight planets? Not necessarily. There may be others waiting to be discovered.
Is there a Planet Nine there? With the discovery of new, distant dwarf planets, astronomers finally realized that their motions around the sun are not perfectly aligned.
Complex simulations on supercomputers can be used to model how gravitational interactions occur in complex environments like the solar system.
In 2016, Caltech astronomers Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown concluded that mathematically there should be a ninth planet after modeling the dwarf planet and its observation path.
Their modeling revealed that the planet is about 10 times more massive than Earth and located about 90 billion kilometers from the sun (about 15 times farther than Pluto). This is a pretty bold claim, and some remain skeptical.
You might think it would be easy to determine whether such a planet exists. Point your telescope at where you think this is. If we could look at galaxies billions of light-years away, wouldn’t we be able to find our solar system’s ninth planet? Now, the question is, could this theoretical planet be It means how bright (not bright) it is. According to the best estimates, this star is at the depth limit of Earth’s largest telescope. In other words, it could be 600 times fainter than Pluto.
Another problem is that you don’t know exactly where to look. Our solar system is so large that it would take a considerable amount of time to cover the entire region of the sky where Planet Nine could be hiding. To further complicate matters, there are only a few periods each year when the conditions are ideal for this search.
But that doesn’t mean we stop looking. In 2021, a research team using the Atacama Space Telescope (a millimeter-wave radio telescope) announced the results of their investigation of the movement of the ninth planet on the outskirts of our solar system.
Although its existence could not be confirmed, 10 candidates were provided for further follow-up. We may only have a few more years to learn what lurks in our planet’s neighboring suburbs.
Discovery of exoplanets Although there are telescopes that can reveal galaxies in the early days of the universe, it is still not easy to directly image planets outside the solar system, called exoplanets.
The reason lies in basic physics. Planets emit light in a very dim red wavelength, so we can only see them clearly when they reflect starlight. The farther a planet is from the star, the harder it is to see.
Astronomers knew they had to find another way to search for planets in foreign star systems. Before Pluto was reclassified, they had already detected the first exoplanet, 51 Pegasi B, using the radial velocity method.
This gas giant world is large enough and close enough to its star that the gravitational tug of war between the two can be detected all the way from Earth. However, this method of discovery is tedious and difficult from the surface of the Earth.
So astronomers came up with another way to find exoplanets: the transit method. When Mercury or Venus pass in front of the Sun, they block a small amount of the Sun’s light. With powerful telescopes, we can look for this phenomenon even in distant star systems.
This is done via the Kepler Space Telescope and the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS). Both have observed tens of thousands of stars and discovered thousands of new planets, dozens of which are about the same size as Earth.
But these observatories can only tell us the size of the planet and its distance from the star. They cannot tell us whether there is a possibility of life on the planet. For that, we need the James Webb Space Telescope.
In search of life The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has just completed its first year and a half of scientific research. Among its many achievements is the detection of molecules in the atmospheres of exoplanets, a feat made possible by the transit method.
One of these exoplanets, WASP-17, is also known as “Hot Jupiter.” It looks like something ripped from the pages of a science fiction novel, and its clouds contain evidence of quartz nanocrystals.
Meanwhile, super-Earth K2-18b (discovered by Kepler) shows signs of methane and carbon dioxide. But while such discoveries are surprising, there is a magical ingredient necessary for life: water vapor.
The field of planetary research is evolving and 2024 looks promising. Perhaps JWST will eventually produce signs of water vapor in the exoplanet’s atmosphere. Maybe the ninth planet will even surprise us all, filling the void left by Pluto.
Stay tuned for exciting science in the future.
(This story has not been edited by Devdiscourse staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)