Even more amazing that it was found in the era it was. People were pouring over the skies looking for the next big planet, and instead they found this little guy.
There are still some orbital dynamics suggestions that something large and dark is lurking out there – an ice giant. But it’s still largely conjecture. It’d be interesting to see how they define it should they find something very large (say Neptune mass), but it hasn’t cleared its orbit. Is it a planet or not? :D
Actually 🤓 it was James Cook who found Australia and he didn’t go there by ski but by ship and he didn’t find one little guy but exterminated a whole indigenous population
When they came for Pluto, I said nothing because I wasn’t a planet
When they came for Australia, I said nothing because I wasn’t a continent
When they came for Bielefeld, I said nothing because I wasn’t a city
When they came for me, there was no one left to say anything
Discreetly insulting both Australia and Pluto in one sentence! Absolutely love this; will share it with all my Australia and Plutonian friends! If Earth gets attacked, it’s not my fault, but yours :'P
Absolute size isn’t really in the criteria for a planet though. Pluto isn’t a planet because it shares its orbit with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.
Do you mean the Trojans? They’re excluded from the mass calculation of ‘clearing the neighbourhood’ because they’re in a resonant orbit - their orbit is a consequence of Jupiter’s mass.
I don’t know. I don’t think we should make excuses for Jupiter just because of its size. Pluto’s doing the best it can. Could any of us do any better, so far out from the sun?
Thanks to your comments, I went looking at more about Jupiter’s influence on us and read that most of the other planets are more in line with Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane (which sounds impressive, but maybe only makes complete sense since the planets would have all initially formed from the same disk). Anyway, thanks
That’s really interesting!
I just discovered a theory about the cause of the ‘late heavy bombardment’, which is thought to have delivered water to earth via comets.
Essentially the gas giants all orbited much closer, but Jupiter and Saturn got into resonance and flung Uranus and Neptune way out (and Saturn too). Uranus and Neptune flew out into the path of a heap of ice, and their gravity pulled the ice into an orbit that collided with the terrestrial planets.
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