Aiigghhtt lets talk about the Kuiper belt
OK so I hear alot of people being sad and complaining about Pluto not being a planet anymore (honestly, it makes me sad too) but there is actually a good reason for it!
Ok, so something must match three criteria before its defined as a planet:
- must orbit the sun (check)
- must have a mass large enough to get the rounded shape (check)
- must have its orbit cleared/clearing the neighborhood around its orbit ( UH OH)
That’s because recently they discovered the Kuiper belt which Pluto is part of. A basic description of the Kuiper belt would be that it is basically all the shit left over from when the planets formed (the solar system landfill, if you will)
Astronomers are , like, constantly finding Pluto sized dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt (like Eris and Makemake) and there are probably hundreds or thousands of them in there
It is suspected that at least another fifty known objects in the Solar System are dwarf planets, and estimates are that up to 200 dwarf planets may be found when the entire region known as the Kuiper belt is explored, and that the number might be as high as 2,000 when objects scattered outside the Kuiper belt are considered.
Holy shit!
Three New "Plutos"? Possible Dwarf Planets Found
news.nationalgeographic.comThree relatively bright space rocks recently found in Pluto’s neighborhood may be new members of the dwarf planet family, astronomers say.
The objects were discovered in a little studied section of the Kuiper belt, a region of the solar system that starts beyond the orbit of Neptune and extends 5.1 billion miles (8.2 billion kilometers) from the sun.
Astronomer Scott Sheppard, of the Carnegie Institute of Washington, and colleagues found the bodies using the 1.3-meter Warsaw University Telescopeat Las Campanas in Chile.
The region of the Kuiper belt visible from Earth’s Northern Hemisphere has been fairly well studied. But until recently, a lack of instruments prohibited searches from the Southern Hemisphere.
The latest survey turned up 14 new Kuiper belt objects, three of which are probably big enough to join Pluto, Eris, Ceres, Haumea, and Makemake in dwarf-planet status, the study authors say. (Related: “Pluto Gets 14 New Neighbors.”)
“I’m glad someone finally did it. It needed to happen,” Mike Brown, a Caltech astronomer who was not involved in the study, said of the southern-sky survey.
Dwarf planet Makemake is nothing but an airless planet of frozen rock
Even with the most powerful telescopes, astronomers can’t get a good look at the incredibly distant Kuiper Belt dwarf planets at the edge of the solar system. We can get fleeting glimpses, but they’re so far out, the best we can do is to apply techniques we would use to try and glimpse at stars on the other side of the galaxy.
