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posted by martyb on Friday May 25 2018, @01:38PM   Printer-friendly
from the Gee-Mickey...-is-THAT-what-I'm-made-of? dept.

Pluto May Not Be a Planet, But It Could Be Made Out of Millions of Comets

Pluto may not be categorised as a planet any more, but it still holds plenty of fascination. For instance, how did the dwarf planet form, and why is it so different from the planets? By examining its chemical composition, researchers have come up with a new idea: Pluto is made of comets.

According to the currently accepted model, planets are formed by the gradual accretion of smaller objects - and Pluto, situated right next to the Kuiper Belt asteroid field, has long been thought to have formed the same way. So that part is nothing new.

But there are similarities between Pluto and Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko that scientists from the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) believe may not be coincidental. In particular, the nitrogen-rich ice in Pluto's Sputnik Planitia.

[...] "We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta."

Also at SwRI.

Primordial N2 provides a cosmochemical explanation for the existence of Sputnik Planitia, Pluto (DOI unknown, Journal Icarus) (arXiv)


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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by VLM on Friday May 25 2018, @02:30PM (16 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 25 2018, @02:30PM (#684022)

    A trans man is a ... yeah got ya there.

    Its just height-ism. When astronomers talk about the criteria of "clearing the neighborhood" thats really a codeword for banging THOTs, ya know, planetary style, and if Pluto is too dwarf-ish-ly short per red pill theory to bang THOTs well ship some vidya game systems out on the next space probe because NEET Pluto is going to be an incel beta orbiter dwarf planet, just too short to get chicks. Wikipedia claims alpha planet Jupiter has 69 moons, no kidding about the "69" giggle giggle giggle. Blue pill people say the radiation environment by Jupiter is too toxic and that red spot tattoo is toxic male masculinity, but chicks love a bad boy and that alpha male planet is banging so many satellites it must be hard to remember all the names, I think at this point his plates just have numbers not even names, now he's squirting intense electromagnetic radiation on the face of satellite #24, that's hot. Sure Pluto is beta orbiting Charon but she's so fat she's almost as big as him, and Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra don't count because they're under age and Pluto is getting none of that. Also Hydra looks like a fat chick I saw at Walmart. Pluto, total beta orbiter. Even guys who can't get dates and look thru telescopes all night won't respect him.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @02:40PM (15 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 25 2018, @02:40PM (#684027)

    The problem with dwarf planets is that there are just too many of them. If you call them planets, that's like calling all female mammals women.

    When Pluto was discovered, we had no idea how many Kuiper objects there were. Now that we are starting to know, we can either "draw an arbitrary line in the ice" that Pluto is the smallest planet and accept that there are possibly dozens more "planets" out there, or accept all Kuiper belt and asteriod belt objects in solar orbit as planets and push up the number of "planets" into the tens of thousands.

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    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Friday May 25 2018, @03:03PM (5 children)

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 25 2018, @03:03PM (#684040)

      If you call them planets, that's like calling all female mammals women.

      That's kinda the point of the whole anti-pluto thing where if you focus on personal identity I suppose it matters, but if you're just trying to accomplish a general goal, in context its kinda, "sheep, woman, whatever".

      Without looking it up off the top of my head there's that Hawaiian Goddess named planet thats numerically bordering on being more of a planet than Pluto is, on an individual identity basis its a big deal to fight about, but as a general goal of calculating spaceship trajectories or planning a colony, none of that matters to the general goal. Does it have all the historical cultural baggage of humans identifying it a planet, or is it a convenient big round ball of resources in space to be used regardless what its called?

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @03:17PM (2 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 25 2018, @03:17PM (#684045)

        People get worked up when stuff they were taught in elementary school changes.

        If they would pay attention, lots more than "what is a planet" has changed.

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      • (Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday May 25 2018, @11:07PM (1 child)

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Friday May 25 2018, @11:07PM (#684256) Journal

        Seriously, it seems a major reason for this discrimination against Pluto is fear of having to count higher than 10. Might confuse the public, oh noes! A simple, easy definition is that if the body orbits a star, and it has sufficient mass to form into a spherical shape under its own gravity, and has done so, then it is a planet. With that definition, our solar system could have dozens of planets, including Pluto, Ceres, Eris, and the other spherical bodies we've found so far in the Kuiper belt. Charon should also be considered a planet. In contrast, Triton is not a planet, but only because it orbits Neptune.

        The criteria astronomers came up with to exclude Pluto and the rest of the dwarfs seem too contrived. It depends too much on location. Any terrestrial planet in Pluto's orbit would be disqualified. If Neptune wasn't present, Pluto would be planet. Worse, it's not hard to come up with scenarios in which the planetary status of a large body continually changes, fluctuating between planet and dwarf planet over a matter of days. If the hypothesized Mars sized planet Theia was in Earth's orbit, were neither Theia nor Earth planets until they collided? We don't do the same thing with moons. The definition of a moon is actually much more liberal. It doesn't even have to be round to count as a moon. Somehow it's okay for Jupiter to have 69 moons, but not for the sun to have lots of planets. If we want to say the solar system has only 8 planets (or 9, if the hypothesis of the existence a Planet 9 is correct), then maybe Jupiter has only 4 moons.

        Pluto's status has another political dimension most may not be aware of. It is the only planet discovered by the US. Some would like to reduce its status just to slight America. On the other hand, counting Pluto as a planet was motivated in part to honor America.

        • (Score: 2) by VLM on Saturday May 26 2018, @04:20PM

          by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Saturday May 26 2018, @04:20PM (#684572)

          We haven't found many objects "on the border" of gravitational speherical-ness but there's a lot of objects right on the border of gravitationally clearing their lane, which leads to a lot of foolishness about this asteroid is almost a planet but this planet is now merely an asteroid and WTF.

          I kinda like my economic definition that gets no respect; is it round and a likely place for a future colony's main space travel destination, then its a planet. So if you have space liners stopping at pluto, then local transit to Charon then its a planet. Kinda like island chains on the Earth.

    • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday May 25 2018, @04:52PM (6 children)

      by bob_super (1357) on Friday May 25 2018, @04:52PM (#684082)

      There will soon be 4 billion women. Do you propose we rename all but 8 of them to not-Joes-females, to make your inventory easier ?

      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @05:44PM (5 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 25 2018, @05:44PM (#684099)

        But there are trillions of female mammals, if we let them all be called women it might lead to some inappropriate behavior. It was a riff on the "dwarf prostitutes are still prostitutes", why yes, yes they are, but there aren't more dwarf prostitutes than regular prostitutes, certainly not more by orders of magnitude, so calling dwarf prostitutes prostitutes doesn't dilute the term so much.

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        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by bob_super on Friday May 25 2018, @05:55PM (4 children)

          by bob_super (1357) on Friday May 25 2018, @05:55PM (#684109)

          1) Hydrostatic equilibrium (mostly round)
          2) Orbits star

          Yup, maybe thousand of them. Why do we care?
          8 are special because of where they are, but calling every single other one "dwarf" is totally arbitrary. Pluto and Eris are half the diameter of Mercury, which is tiny compared to Jupiter.

    • (Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 25 2018, @05:38PM (1 child)

      by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Friday May 25 2018, @05:38PM (#684095) Journal

      The problem with dwarf planets is that there are just too many of them.

      This argument seems less compelling each time I see it. If we end up with a thousand gravitationally rounded planets in our solar system, just don't require kids to learn all of their names (sorry Eris, Orcus, Sedna, Quaoar, Makemake, Salacia...)

      Still, the expansion of the solar system "planets" list may be inevitable now that there is indirect evidence of a Neptune-like Nine [wikipedia.org] and Mars-like Ten [arizona.edu].

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      • (Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 25 2018, @05:47PM

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 25 2018, @05:47PM (#684102)

        The "demotion" was a political disaster, but I think it's appropriate to call them dwarf planets and keep the distinction as it currently is, if school kids still want to call the dwarf planet Pluto a planet, that's not so far off the mark. Now, if Nine, Ten and even Eleven and Twelve only pass into visibility rarely, less than once per orbit of Neptune, then they are: A) certainly worth knowing about, and B) possibly worthy of a distinct classification such as Wide Roving Planet or some such.

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