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December 17 - December 21, 2023
On May 12, 1930, a mere two months after Pluto’s discovery, the Adler Planetarium, on Chicago’s South Lake Shore Drive, opened for business—the first of its kind in the Western Hemisphere1 and today the oldest surviving planetarium in the world.
Pluto Water was bottled on the grounds of the palatial French Lick Springs Hotel in Indiana, about 50 miles south of Bloomington.
the moons of Uranus are named for characters in Shakespearean plays. Among them we find Ariel, Caliban, and Miranda (all from The Tempest), Oberon and Puck (both from A Midsummer Night’s Dream), and Bianca (from The Taming of the Shrew).
Pluto is, after all, the god of the dead and underworld, the realm of darkness. And what else, if not darkness, prevails 4 billion miles from the Sun?
What matters is that the seeds were sown for planet Pluto to receive a level of attention from the American public that far exceeds its astrophysical significance in the solar system.
Water as a laxative. I dislike prunes but love pizza. Given that Americans eat 100 acres of pizza a day,
William Herschel discovered Uranus in 1781. And Johann Galle, of the Berlin Observatory, discovered Neptune in 1846. But few people know that on January 1, 1801, the Italian astronomer Giuseppi Piazzi discovered the planet Ceres happily and silently orbiting the Sun between Mars and Jupiter. The suspiciously large gap between Mars and Jupiter had finally been filled. But astronomers rapidly determined that Ceres was much, much smaller than any other planet. Then on March 28, 1802, the German astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers discovered the planet Pallas in the same orbital zone as Ceres.
PLUTO CONTAINS ABOUT 70 PERCENT ROCK AND 30 percent ice if you measure things by mass. But rock is denser than ice, leaving the rocky parts to occupy only 45 percent of Pluto’s volume. If volume is what matters to you, then you can rightly declare that Pluto is mostly ice.
Pluto is by far the least massive planet, with less than 5 percent the mass of Mercury, the solar system’s next smallest planet.
Pluto spends 20 years out of its 248-year orbit closer than Neptune to the Sun.
Pluto is so small compared with Charon—that they orbit a spot that sits not within Pluto itself, but in free space. In other words, unlike the moons of every other planet in the solar system, where their center of motion falls within the physical body of the host planet, the Pluto-Charon system orbits a point in space outside of the physical extent of Pluto itself.
Pluto and Charon are in a rare double tidal lock, always showing the same face to each other.
Although Pluto’s orbit crosses that of Neptune, they will never collide because Neptune has Pluto in another kind of lock, called an orbital resonance. For every three trips around the Sun that Neptune takes, Pluto takes exactly two, leaving them in an eternal three-to-two resonance with each other. No other pair of planets behaves this way.
Contrary to what it looks like to teeny humans crawling on its surface, Earth, as a cosmic object, is remarkably smooth; if you had a gigantic finger and you rubbed it across Earth’s surface (oceans and all), Earth would feel as smooth as a cue ball. Expensive globes that portray raised portions of Earth’s landmasses to indicate mountain ranges depict a grossly exaggerated reality.
When your reasons for believing something are justified ad hoc, you are left susceptible to further discoveries undermining the rationale for that belief.
specialize in star formation and galaxy evolution.
methinks
hoopla
The organization of the solar system, how the solar system came to be the way it is—those are genuine scientific questions. But the labels you give things—no. You’re having an argument over something you generate rather than what is fundamental to the universe. While you’re sitting around debating, Pluto and the rest of the universe happily keep doing whatever it is they do, without regard to our urges to classify.
On October 21, 2003, Brown, Trujillo, and Rabinowitz photographed, but only later revealed, the ninth largest solar system body in orbit around the Sun: 136199 Eris, whose diameter falls somewhere between 2,400 and 3,000 kilometers (Pluto’s checks in at 2,300 kilometers) and whose mass is 27 percent larger than that of Pluto.
Surely the point of an exhibit in science is to inform and educate and not just to feed prejudices and expectations.
cogitate
Although we think it’s DOPEY that Pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf planet, which has made some people GRUMPY and others just SLEEPY, we are not BASHFUL in saying we would be HAPPY if Disney’s Pluto would join us as an 8th dwarf. We think this is just what the DOC ordered and is nothing to SNEEZE at.
