Pluto isn’t a planet — but it gives us clues for how the solar system formed

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Though Pluto has formally been considered a dwarf planet for almost two decades, it still has many lessons left for planetary scientists — including hints about how the solar system formed.

If you were born in the last century you might have memorized that there were nine planets in our solar system, as heard in the famous. Upon the discovery of its existence in 1930, Pluto enjoyed decades of special status as one of the solar system's planets.looks into this demotion from"planet" to"dwarf planet." It's a shift that on its face might seem slight — all that's happened is the word"dwarf" was added in front of"planet.

For Pluto and the 8 planets, this process begins with clouds of gas and dust in space. Once dust enters a disk of gas orbiting a star, Lyra says that a kind of coagulation happens. That coagulation creates larger"grains" of dust,"a bit like if you don't clean your room often enough — you're going to get dust bunnies, right? Now imagine you don't clean your room for 10 million years.

Pluto’s first official surface-feature names are listed on this map. Among them,"Tombaugh Regio," the official name for the heart-shaped crater on the dwarf planet's surface, which honors Clyde Tombaugh. He is the American astronomer who discovered Pluto in 1930. See theGiven these connections, Lyra is in favor of the geophysical planet definition. He says that instead of limiting planets to only eight in the solar system, we could include all of the dwarf planets and even moons.

 

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We could float effortlessly in Pluto's subsurface oceanRahul Rao is a graduate of New York University's SHERP and a freelance science writer, regularly covering physics, space, and infrastructure. His work has appeared in Gizmodo, Popular Science, Inverse, IEEE Spectrum, and Continuum. He enjoys riding trains for fun, and he has seen every surviving episode of Doctor Who.
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