Pluto is ridiculously cool. Small body research is at the forefront of getting a handle on the conditions of the early Solar System. Between discoveries made by the Rosetta mission [1], Dawn's visit to Vesta and Ceres [2], and the incredible discovery of rings around Chariklo [3], we are really in a golden age at the moment.
New Horizons has a lot more in store, not in the least because we know that there are at least two other moons in the system: Styx [4] and Kerberos [5] (discovered by my advisor Mark Showalter [6]). There's been a concerted effort to search for rings around Pluto too, not in the least to be able to assess the safe passage of New Horizons through the system.
All I can say is don't blink, you're not gonna wanna miss this!
You've gotta see him in action; he gives great talks. Here's a recording of his SETI talk on the discovery of Styx and Kerberos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6t51YPOuSA (I worked on Uranus' moon Mab, which is mentioned at the start of the talk).
If you get the chance to see him live, I'd definitely recommend it. Unfortunately, he's very busy, so even during my PhD I haven't had many chances to sit down with him.
The coolest thing to me is that Mark is a dynamicist actually, but has such a deep understanding of instrumentation and image processing that he can attack new discoveries from both sides. Good example of why it serves to have many tools in your toolbox.
Oh man, it finally made it. I remember working on the ground telemetry bit for New Horizons about 11 years ago (has it been that long?). The C++ code base was hard to understand, and I'm sure I didn't make it any better as a junior developer.
I worked on the part that said, "Hey, are you still there?", and listened for "Yeah, I'm still alive." That was my small contribution.
It was one of the few groups at APL at that time that was actually using source control. (hurray!) Everyone else was doing something akin to copying file folders on a shared drive. I was even on a code base that had comment annotations of the person that changed the line. I think APL has adopted source control lab-wide now, after some hard lobbying by software devs there.
My understanding was Pluto could not be a "planet" because it was not a part of the formation of the original solar system due to it being located beyond the frost line boundary [1] which separates terrestrial planets from gas giants.
Basically, anything within the frost line boundary is close enough to the protosun that things like solid water, CO2, et al. melt, allowing for accretion of solid matter and eventually rocky (terrestrial planets). Anything beyond the frost line, and these solid materials freeze up then accrete, and then collect gas from the protosolar accretion disk, forming gas giants.
It's entirely possible Pluto could've been a part of the original solar system but somehow wasn't massive enough to collect gas, or it was a captured object not present during the formation of the solar system.
Either way, I'm sure New Horizons will discover more.
In my opinion, the IAU was correct in downgrading Pluto to a dwarf planet. Scientific observation and study should not be dictated by social tradition.
I think these images help them figure out what's interesting to study as the probe gets closer. It's going to zoom by, so they need to know beforehand what to look at.
The word "spots" in the headline suggested (at least to me and apparently others) that the moons were previously unknown. Buried lede and all that. Still cool but not quite as exciting as New Horizons discovering new moons.
That's very interesting. It's not moving with the background stars. However it could still be a camera artifact - see how there's a 'trail' behind Pluto's disc? In frames 4-7, the object you've identified is in the same position relative to the trail (off to the right if you are following a line outwards from Pluto along the trail).
I made an image to show what I mean. See frames 4-7; it's not an exact match but maybe it's a clue: http://i.imgur.com/TADflVd.jpg
I hadn't considered the rotation, because as you point out, it doesn't exactly match up. It's gaining distance from the center of image as it moves.
It could still be some kind of internal reflection artifact (even dust?) which varies in distance slightly, I guess. I'm pretty sure the team looking at these images would have gone over every object in depth, so it's unlikely I've spotted something they haven't :)
That's not what the IAU classification is based on [1]. There are dynamical reasons to argue for the fact that a planet has to have cleared it's orbit. Pluto fails in this regard. A lot of people mistake the reclassification of Pluto as folly, when there are fundamental reasons that underpin the current definition of a planet. This has evolved as we've come to understand the dynamical processes that shape the Solar System.
> There are dynamical reasons to argue for the fact that a planet has to have cleared it's orbit
Maybe so, but as the wiki article points out in its criticism section, this excludes Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune from being planets.
I don't think it's so much folly as much as a waste of everyone's time. "Planet" isn't a natural thing like the speed of light, if astrophysicists want to be more specific about which orbiting bodies they're talking about, which "dynamical processes" they're talking about, they should come up with a new term instead of dragging literally everyone (including the children!) into an argument over definitions. It's like a scientist insisting that "sound" can only refer to this vague thing a brain experiences, and it can't refer to generic vibrations in the air, but some people are still on the fence about whether it can refer to vibrations in water.
"Most astronomers counter this opinion by saying that, far from not having cleared their orbits, the major planets completely control the orbits of the other bodies within their orbital zone. Although Jupiter does coexist with a large number of small bodies in its orbit (the Trojan asteroids), these bodies only exist in Jupiter's orbit because they are in the sway of the planet's huge gravity. Similarly, Pluto may cross the orbit of Neptune, but Neptune long ago locked Pluto and its attendant Kuiper belt objects, called plutinos, into a 3:2 resonance (i.e., they orbit the Sun twice for every three Neptune orbits). Since the orbits of these objects are entirely dictated by Neptune's gravity, Neptune is therefore gravitationally dominant."
It's not a waste of the astronomers' time, because they need a reasonable taxonomy to communicate with each other. It's clear that the current set of planets are different from the things that are not planets. If we included Pluto in the set of planets, we'd need to come up with a new word to describe the subset that does not include Pluto - so it's much easier to take Pluto out of that set, and continue calling them "planets".
Other people have wasted their own time by having an emotional attachment to what words the astronomers use.
I don't believe the International Astronomical Union has offered an opinion about the Webster's definition of the word, or about how you and your six year-old may use "planet" in ordinary language.
The IAU's definition is a scientific definition, one that pertains to usage among astronomers. Insisting that astronomers make up another word is silly for all the same reasons that (as you pointed out) it would be silly for astronomers to tell us how to use one of our everyday, non-technical words. The same sequence of characters or phonemes can have slightly different meanings in different contexts.
But the IAU definition makes no sense for astronomical use, particularly as we get better at finding extrasolar plane^H^Horbital bodies. We're going to have hundreds of repeats of Ceres/Vesta/Pluto - bodies that we discover, consider to be planets, and then only much later with finer techniques discover that there were other bodies in the same orbit. That's not good for science.
Upvoted, as this is an excellent point. The IAU definition makes serious presumptions about our level of knowledge. Could the IAU definition be used at the time of Pluto's discovery? If not, what does that say about using this definition for future discoveries?
Note that I'm not saying that I think that dwarf planets should be categorized as planets (there are too many), but that the definition shouldn't depend upon us having complete knowledge of every object in a newly discovered potential planet's neighborhood.
I kind of agree with this. Let there be planets and perhaps that should include 'subplanets' and then let there be a next level to their taxonomy where they can be described as 'clear orbit' or not.
I expect that there will be further 'evolutions' of the definition as we learn more and more about exoplanets, there are nearly 2000 of them already.
Seems like the biological sciences have done a decent job, you've got your common names and then Latin taxonomical descriptions which make up formal names.
It's also worth remembering that "planet" is an ancient word that has changed its meaning over time. Originally "planet" was the name for bodies that were visible to the naked eye but too far from Earth to show a visible disk. If Earth had a moon that was much smaller, it likely would have been considered a "planet", back in the day.
With the advent of Galilean observations and Newtonian dynamics, "planet" came to mean "large body orbiting the sun", with asteroids being some object of indeterminate type (thus the weird name suggesting similarity to stars, not planets).
Concepts are made things. We divide reality up according to acts of selective attention based on what divisions are most useful to us. The way the world is, independently of us, constrains those divisions but does not determine them.
Most people are basically Platonists, and have a lot of trouble with this kind of epistemic pragmatism. Others--nominalists--reject the Platonic model with the claim that because categories are not determined by reality they must not be constrained by it.
Neither group has a good handle on how an apparently simple concept like planet can legitimately change over time while still being strongly constrained by objective reality as our knowledge expands and our purposes alter, but to an epistemic pragmatist it is precisely what you expect all concepts to do.
You would have to come up with a new definition for what we currently call planets, since they are clearly different (more massive, more regular orbit, etc). It's more reasonable to call the newly discovered things something different instead of renaming old things.
Perihelion of 29.657 AU was in 1989, when it would have been 5.5 days. "Have Spacesuit Will Travel" was written in 1958, so the distance to Pluto was about what it is now. Earth orbit variability makes that +/- about 3 hours.
Top speed is sqrt(2 * (8 * 9.81 m/s/s) * (32.6 AU/2) ) / (speed of light) = 6.5% of light speed.
I'm not sure that Kip and Peewee would have survived 5+ days at 8 g. Apparently the only week-long >1 g tests we've done have been 1.5g, says http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/6154/maximum-surviv... , though we've done tests for 1,000 seconds (16 minutes) at 4 g.
Forget the semantics. Pluto should still be called a planet because it was called so historically. Let it stand as an illustration of the discovery process.
You don't see lawyers getting mad every time someone uses the term "relevant" incorrectly. They aren't phoning the dictionary people to say that the lawyer definition should trump common understanding and meaning.
The giant squid was once the biggest squid. Then came what we now know as the colossal squid. Technically, the word "giant" should only be applied to the biggest. But nobody seriously wanted to rename the giant squid. So they came up with a "colossal" exception to the rule. Sentimental attachment has value.
"Killer Whales" may not be whales (they are big dolphins) but nobody is our there correcting every mention of the term or going on John Stewart to lecture us on why we aren't using a scientific term in exactly the same manner as scientists do in papers. Whale biologists, despite following the most elevated of all scientific disciplines, still have that sense of humility so lacking amongst astronomers.
New Horizons has a lot more in store, not in the least because we know that there are at least two other moons in the system: Styx [4] and Kerberos [5] (discovered by my advisor Mark Showalter [6]). There's been a concerted effort to search for rings around Pluto too, not in the least to be able to assess the safe passage of New Horizons through the system.
All I can say is don't blink, you're not gonna wanna miss this!
[1] http://rosetta.esa.int/
[2] http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rings_of_Chariklo
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Styx_(moon)
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerberos_(moon)
[6] http://www.seti.org/users/mark-showalter