Pluto’s again, child! Seventeen years after it was demoted from planet to dwarf planet, it’s time for Pluto to retake its former title…at the least in accordance to our hosts, Chelsea Whyte and Leah Crane.
In this episode of Dead Planets Society, Chelsea and Leah get into the nitty-gritty of what it will take to formally make Pluto a planet – not by altering the guidelines laid out by the International Astronomical Union, however by altering the solar system. They are joined of their quest by Kathryn Volk at the University of Arizona and Konstantin Batygin at the California Institute of Technology.
Of the necessities to formally be a planet, the one Pluto misses out on is the skill to clear its orbital path of particles: the distant little world is simply not sufficiently big to sweep away all the different rocks in its orbit. So what if it had been greater? It would take a lot of mass to make that occur, and there could be penalties to super-sizing it.
Maybe it will be simpler to merely drag Pluto to a higher orbit, someplace that’s already largely empty – so long as that orbit is much sufficient from the solar that Pluto doesn’t simply evaporate. There is at all times the choice to drop a small black gap into Pluto or shrink the solar system round it. Those could also be harder to accomplish, however our hosts are up to the problem.
Dead Planets Society is a podcast that takes outlandish concepts about how to tinker with the cosmos – from snapping the moon in half to inflicting a gravitational wave apocalypse – and topics them to the legal guidelines of physics to see how they fare.
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