Check out my BRAND NEW Displate collection of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn here: displate.com/astrumspace?art=5f04759ac338b Hopefully you can treat yourself or a space lover you know this Christma - plus 33% off if you get 3 or more before 24th Dec 2023.
Alex, what a nice garden you have, with so much space between the houses. It reminds me of the home where I grew up. There was always plenty of room for sports between two houses (both facing walls had to be sans windows.)
@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist- Does this seem like a church meeting to you? Your statement is both irrelevant and inappropriate. Instead of your intended goal of winning converts for Christ, you're just being annoying and lazy. Dropping a random 'repent' message in an unrelated UA-cam comment is easy. Go out and walk your talk. Help feed the hungry, work to get housing for the homeless, help troubled young people who have known nothing of acceptance, kindness, and understanding in their short, wounded lives. Do something -- talk is cheap, and right now you're making a fool of yourself. Give of yourself and keep your mouth shut if you're only going to speak in slogans, nd stop being so damn annoying.
3:21 very important visualisation, and a lot of people would benefit from watching that section in general. Galaxies aren't small, they're dim. Hubble's power is not in its ability to squint, but its attention span.
can't be for real, how do you control something billions of miles away? going away from the sun with, plummeting temps I thought it was so-called meteors and space debris out there how does it deal with those temps, fuel, maintenance. How do you control let alone communicate with something that far from earth and the sun. if so-called pluto was real it would be a ball of ice.
Pluto was such a surprise - many predicted that it would be a cold, dark, bland and inactive rock but it turned out to be a very strange and complex body with active surface features.
I also grew up with 9 planets scheme and felt sad when Pluto lost the title planet... Surely with the introduction of the term dwarf planet a lot of other small neighbors in the system got an identity, like Ceres let's say, but Pluto is not a spherical rock like the other dwarf planets I know of! It is active geothermically, it has atmosphere and maybe it is even more alive than we think, certainly far more interesting than Mercury which is considered a planet being just a spherical rock orbiting the Sun, no moons no nothing. Pluto is a dual planetary system with many small moons and an orbit of its own... A unique situation in the neighborhood! Pluto will be forever a planet in my heart now even more after we all saw Pluto's beautiful white heart drawn on its bright red soil! Cheers from Greece! Great video as always. Jim
He gave a keynote at Stellafane 30 or so years ago... The story he told, of Pluto's discovery, will always be part of astronomy history. I don't remember any hecklers complaining that he didn't actually discover a planet, during his talk. But nerds can be sticklers about minutiae of definitions, and people back then still recognized that Pluto was somewhat different from the other outer planets... and people suspected that we might find more distant plutos with strange orbits, but so what.
Looking at the two images (featured ~11:46), I find it interesting that the one on the left seems brighter compared to the one on the right. I wonder if that aided or hindered the comparison... or perhaps didn't impact it at all? Looking at the images without a "blink comparator" (or any other aid), Pluto stands out a bit in the right image as a bright dot that should have been even brighter in the left image. Instead, it is absent... at least at the same spot in the photo. Given that the right image appears darker, one might make the general statement that points of light on the right should appear even brighter on the left. Similarly, dim points on the left might not appear at all on the right. Conversely, if there is a bright spot on the right, one would expect it to NOT be dimmer on the left. Having said that, take a look at the right hand image and note the point of light that is approximately 32% from the left edge of the image and about 6% from the top edge of the image. As another point of reference, one of the brightest spots in the image is almost directly down from it while the other of the brightest spots is to the "east southeast" of it. Being on the right hand image, one would expect it to be on the left hand image and probably appearing even brighter in the left hand image. However, that spot of light is absent from the left hand image. I'm sure this isn't the first time someone's observed this difference over the last 90+ years, but I would be curious to know if there's a known explanation for it. There's one other difference that I can see that defies my expectations that is in the same general area. In the left-hand image, find what I called earlier "one of the brightest spots in the image", roughly 33% from the left and 30% from the top. If you travel "north northeast" of that spot, you'll find a spot of medium brightness (less than half the diameter of the aforementioned "brightest spot", but still much brighter than most spots). If you keep following the same "north northeast" line you'll soon see yet another spot, not as bright as the "medium brightness" spot. This is the Spot of Note. Close to the left of it are two even smaller spots, one "west northwest", the other "west southwest" of the Spot of Note. To emphasize, these two spots are smaller, yet they are visible in the right hand image. However, the Spot of Note (which should theoretically be brighter than those two spots) does not appear in the right hand image.
Honestly I think being so special to the point of warranting a change to the current system of classification is more remarkable than just a planetary status.
@@robo3007 Eris is the *queen* of the dwarf planets because it’s the most massive, but Pluto is the *king* of the dwarf planets because it’s the biggest and the most famous.
My grand-daughter asked me several years ago "why did they name Pluto after the Disney character". I had to explain that it was the reverse, Disney named Mickey's dog after Pluto the same year it was discovered in 1930. She is in college now and is a lot better informed then she used to be!
Once i saw detailed images of Pluto my mind was blown! I was not expecting that level of geological diversity, mineralization, signs of geologic activity, etc. Pluto has proven to be one of the most dynamic objects in our solar system. Only a few moons come close to Pluto's features. It makes me wonder what systems are fueling these dynamic aspects on Pluto? Is it tidal forces? Is it chemical reactions between different minerals? Is it certain elements that transition between solid ice form/liquid form/etc. depending on the pressure, friction, temperature it's experiencing? I'm really hoping to see a lot more research being done there. Pluto is s million times more interesting than Mars. Something that far away from the sun, it's amazing it's got interesting stuff occuring at all. I feel like there is a lot we can learn from Pluto.
Four theories: 1. Pluto is still differentiating, like Earth did during the Hadian. 2. Pluto had a significant change in it's orbit in the last few million years. Perhaps getting almost captured by Neptune from being a long period comet, and the constant solar radiation has allowed it to begin to differentiate. 3. Pluto had a massive collision in the last few million years, perhaps being the origin of Charon too. 4. Due to some quirk of how our rare ordered solar system formed, Pluto happens to have an outsized amount of radioactive materials. Pluto is a big RTG.
Yeah, I'm gonna be honest I was let down by astrum answering questions such simple questions, from title I thought it was gonna be more about this stuff
Pluto being demoted from planet status had rather annoyed me as I grew up solidly with nine planets. But now that I know that the demotion is due to the discovery of an entire other asteroid belt, I feel privileged to have lived during the time of that discovery. Thanks for the education!
The discovery of the Kuiper Belt isn’t what led to Pluto’s demotion. What led to Pluto’s demotion was a bunch of inexperienced astronomers being scared of having the number of planets reach double digits. It was an irrational and unscientific move. Pluto is a planet.
@@ajaynair2636 thing is, at the time of its discovery, Pluto was the only Kuiper Belt object that we knew of. We thought it was the one and only, and thus was befitting to be called a planet. If we discovered Pluto first among the Asteroid Belt, then further discovery would also lead to the demotion of Pluto by the discovery of the A Belt, too. Not too dissimilar from the so called "planets" in the 1800s textbooks when we only knew of a few object in the Asteroid Belt that were also later demoted.
@@binhturtle179 Disvovering an asteroid belt doesn’t invalidate the planetary features of Pluto. Nearby asteroids have never demoted a planet, so why would the order of discovery make a difference?
I remember my daughter drawing Pluto in her school Science text book on a page containing information about eight planets of the Solar System and self reinstating it as the ninth planet . She was 9 then.
Every generation before us really had no idea how any of the planets actually looked in "Natural Light" 😉; and now every generation after us can spend their time on new questions.🧐 It has been an incredible 60 years! 🤯🤯 Thank you for these essays.
I used Pluto for my speech at college,broke down it's founding, why it was an important find both before and after photos with the new horizon satellite and what makes up Pluto
The first time when I was a kid and I discovered there are more planets in our solar system after Pluto, Eris was the first one I learned about. This marked me so much that fast forward to three years ago when my cat was born, I named her Eris. I know it's after the greek princess of discordia, but it's such a cute and easy to pronounce name, the cat learned it in about 3 weeks.
I love Eris! Her existence is the easiest argument against the silliness of the Pluto lovers that stubbornly insist that Pluto is still a planet and should be somehow listed with the other 8.
I cannot even begin to describe how excited I was about the New Horizons images of Pluto. I remember seeing a picture of Pluto in 1995, at a field trip to the planetarium. It was white, highly pixellated, and looked almost like an upside-down snowman with the moon Charon underneath it. This was believed to be Pluto's ONLY moon at the time.
@@crxtodd16 I'm (unfortunately) old enough to remember black and white TV transmissions of astronauts on the Moon. It's definitely the latter missions and in color, but we had a BW TV :) That was exciting and marked me for life/ So the Artemis stuff is also moving my blood.
@@borisbabichyou should consider yourself fortunate, you were witness to some of the first moments in human history when we were visiting another world
@chrisgristle7014 I do. And it has marked me, my imagination, and it fuelled my love for the cosmos. But I regret the decades lost and wonder what else I'll get to see before I go off after the Voyagers. 😊
05:35 There's another reason why Earth-based (both on or near Earth) telescopes have hard time imaging Pluto that Alex didn't mention: The galaxies and stars are sources of lights (IR to UV to Radio and higher wavelengths) thus they are easier to see, versus Pluto which is mostly (99.99+%) illuminated by what little amounts of sunlight that managed to reach Pluto AND reflects off it back to Earth. That rule about light getting weaker the further light travels applies to BOTH travel directions out from the Sun to Pluto AND back to Earth. This coupled with the incredibly tiny apparant relative size in the sky makes Pluto so durned hard to see. PS: the remaining
I’d love to collect space soil from a local rocky body and grow something in it! Or bring earth soil to another rocky body and learn how the microbes evolve under a variety of conditions
Do you understand how on our life infested earth, different soils impact greatly what can grow on it? Well the most baron place on earth lets say your bleached microwave constantly running for a century at the top of mount Everest is a more appropriate place for life than the best place and time on Mars.
Hopefully, this particular video, didn't actually teach you anything new, as all these concepts are brutally simple and unless you watch 1 astronomy vid per year, nothing in this vid should be remotely new - this is basically kindergarten common sense stuff (perhaps except the IAU, though the reasoning behind dethroning Pluto has been rehashed hundreds times (for obvious reasons))
To the person who makes these videos, I am so impressed. You’re very professional., lovely to listen to, explain things so well, you’re a real gem. Thank you for all that you do and post.. see you in the stars
5:37 In this one scenario you should be pronouncing Charon as Sharon despite the relation to the Greek ferryman to the underworld. James Christy, the discoverer of Charon, wanted to name it after his wife Charlene (pronounced Sharlene) but obviously he couldn't name it Charlene due to naming conventions around Greek and Roman gods for celestial bodies. So the decision was Charon pronounced Sharon. NASA uses his pronunciation. All astrophiles ought know this story.
Which ironically brings it closer to the pronunciation of Charon in (ancient) greek. I first didn’t get the name until I saw it written out and then I thought neat, just like the ferryman.
Neptune and Uranus really interest me because I wonder if there is some superfluid happening in their atmospheres. They are pretty far away from the Sun so they might be cold enough.
Thank You for explaining size and illumination questions. These are not explained much elsewhere at all. Scale and relativity matters with each of our observations.
Pluto and Charon are my favorite astral bodies. They’re very endearing, dancing around each other, somewhere so dark and quiet. Their private little corner of space. So private and comfortable in their privacy, and still so full of love. I don’t think Pluto’s heart is for us. We don’t know it intimately enough for that.
I really appreciated the excellent explanation of the orbit and gravity pull between a smaller planet and larger moon, for instance. I also did not know the sun was influenced by Jupiter’s gravity, cool!
07:25 Another object that has a noticable wobble around a barycenter is the Earth Moon system, which is located about 1000 miles under your feet (OR put another way, about 2900 miles from the Earth's center, which is about 75% of Earth's radius). No other planets besides Pluto has a barycenter that's a noticable distance away from the planet's core. That's because no other two objects in the Solar System involving a Planet has such large relative masses between the planet and it's satellite. Except for Jupiter and the Sun, where the roles are swapped with Jupiter being the satellite around the Sun. The Sun/Jupiter barycenter is JUST above the Sun's surface at around 30,271 miles (or 107% of the Solar radius).
Q: Five: why don't we yet recognize that Pluto and Charon made physical contact? If people get mad at my question then look into how Sputnik Planitia formed and Charon has a huge red stain that does not look like a deposit from floating dust.
The thing people dont realize is that if you were magically placed outside our galaxy, with your back to our galaxy, you might see a faint smudge or two. Other than that it would be unending darkness.
@@ustmissouri8029 I did miss that, but what you would see would be many other galaxies as their light would be clear against the blackness. Four other galaxies can be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
For those still holding on to hope, there are some problems with the newer planet classification guidelines. For one thing, they were made by astronomers and not planetologists. For another, if you put any of the inner planets into Pluto's orbit, they would not have the mass to clear that orbit of other large bodies.
the IAU is very slow with giving out dwarf planet titles officially but theres roughly 4 types in the kuiper belt (not counting ceres, from most to least found): cubewanos: or classical kuiper belt objects, fairly close fairly circular orbits mostly. including makemake and haumea resonance kuiper belt objects: they have a resonance orbit with neptune, some are more common and got a fancy name. plutinos have a 2/3 resonance for example and include pluto, twotinos ahve a 1/2 resonance. same fairly close but tend to have higher inclinations scattered disk: objects with high inclination and eccentricity. usually further out, this includes eris the heaviest dwarf planet known. the last category is very sparse and goes by several names like detached disk, extreme scattered disk, sednoids, inner oort cloud objects or hill cloud object. these are far away and sometimes have very extreme eccentricities or inclinations depending on the type and include sedna there are hundreds of these things known, most dont even have names. they run the gamut of being pretty big to snowball sized.
In terms of orbital changes, one specific interesting example is Neptune's largest moon Triton, which was probably ejected from the Kuiper Belt and then captured by Neptune's gravity. Physically, Triton is incredibly similar to Pluto and any future mission to Neptune would have the fringe benefit of basically being able to study a second Kuiper Belt object for free
To me the main interest of Ceres over the other dwarf planets is that it's accessible. It's already been thoroughly mapped and examined by an orbiting spacecraft and it's not much farther out and colder than Mars so it could be a better target for human exploration than Mars where much stronger gravity makes leaving so much harder.
All great information. My only issue is that my wife's college professor stated in one of her courses that the term "naked eye" is not the correct term for eyes without aid. The term that should be used is "an unaided eye," meaning obviously the eye without any aid. Unfortunately, this drives her crazy because everyone uses the term incorrectly. I told her I believe it is because people like to say naked.😂
It takes 247.9 Earth years for Pluto to make one orbit around the Sun, at an average speed of 10,623 miles per hour (17,096 kilometers per hour) ❤ Pluto ❤ don't worry what others say you have all the time in the universe (to grow big and fast) Time is at your side (enjoy)
I like to define a planet as a permanent solar system body with more than 2000 km diameter. The list of 17 planets would look like this: ORBIT AROUND THE SUN: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris ORBIT ANOTHER PLANET: Moon, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa, Titan, Triton I think this would encourage children and everyone to learn and amaze more at our solar system bodies, despite what they orbit around
@eliasmondino I feel like it's a meaningful difference for categorization. Honestly it wouldn't bother me for a planet to be something that orbits the Sun that is gravitationally rounded.
The issue with this if Pluto becomes a planet Charon most likely will not meet the new bar for planethood unless they go with the dwarf planet definition which they won't cause theres too many of them. Being a binary system doesn't make the junior partner a planet they still are judged individually. Charon is a dwarf planet moon even if Pluto becomes a planet because if Charon wasn't a moon it'd be a dwarf planet.
@@declaringpond2276 Of course they're arbitrary. Everything we do with classifying things in science is arbitrary that's why people need to stop being so precious about it when these things need to be adjusted to make them more useful. Pluto's new category literally also has the term plutoid, they literally made its name the term for the category and people still can't let that change go.
@@Digikidthevoiceofreason Yeah, it is called Eris. And then there is an 11th one, named Sedna, 12th one, named Makemake, etc. Seriously, I cant, with you guys...
I would like a video of how bright the planets look from each other, as if we were on them. I assume the brightest would be seeing Venus when on Mercury. If Venus had a clear atmosphere I assume seeing Earth from it would be the next brightest. Having our view of Venus, Jupiter and Mars as a reference for each view would be helpful. Nobody has seemed to have done this comparative viewpoint.
The ending of this shows something important to keep in mind, science is always changing as we learn more. It reminds me of the Semmelweis story where he discovered hand washing decreased childbirth deaths, but other doctors didn't believe him and continued to infect and kill mothers because they didn't learn about it in school.
I have a better question regarding Pluto because I know why it was downgraded. That question is simply this: Why are we placing artificial and what appear to be entirely arbitrary limits on the number of planets a solar system can have? What difference does it make if it's 8 or 800? This, I believe, is what the science community failed to consider when they made the decision to relegate Pluto. Nonetheless, planet or not, I find it a thoroughly fascinating world.
That is OK - if you want, you can say there are hundreds of planets, and then Pluto, Eris, Makemake, would indeed be listed in that category too. BUT then there will still be a subcategory of that - Main planets, or whatever you wanna call them. And they would still be only 8, not 9, because Pluto would not belong to them. There is no way that you or the Pluto fans can twist this to somehow make it true that Pluto belongs with the other 8 (no matter what you call them), BUT Eris, Makemake and the others dont - that would not make any sense and would simply contradict what science has found out about them. If Pluto belongs, then those others belong too. So, you see, it is not a question of whether we call Pluto a PLANET or not, and how many planets there are in the Solar System - that is just arguing semantics, and doesnt matter. What matters is which other Solar System bodies it should be grouped with, and that question has been resolved - definitely NOT with those 8 (not matter if they are called planets, main planets or whatever). There simply isnt that group of 9 that people thought there were, from 1930 to 2006, because of Pluto being lucky to be randomly discovered 70 years before the others of its actual group :)
In school we had models of our solar system, the 9 PLANET has always been my favorite, the most outer planet, small but it has a certain personality, to me anyway.
This is really good stuff. For the past 20 or so years, when people find out I'm a professional astronomer, their first question is usually, "What happened to Pluto?" My standard smart-alec answer is "Nothing. It's still there." If that doesn't drive them away, I often use the asteroid-Kuiper belt comparison. When the IAU was working on this, there was more than a little sentiment to keep Pluto as a planet, being "grandfathered" in 1930. But no.
This is answering some of the most asked and liked questions I've found on my Pluto videos. I'm interested to hear if you like this format, and if you'd enjoy more videos like this exploring your questions. Find Pluto time where you are here: plutotime.app/ (the website on NASA I used originally when making the video has sadly closed down, but this seems to be a good alternative. I'm not affiliated with this website.)
Just like your last 322 videos, fantastic video. Question.. Is Pluto still considered an enemy planet or was it really ever? Maybe Im thinking about Jupiter? Thanks again, Cheers.
On question 1, there is a second important factor making stars and galaxies more visible than objects like Pluto that you did not mention. They glow by their own light, Pluto does not, and the light it gets from the sun is pretty dim - much dimmer than something slowing with the light of billions of suns. The difference would be even greater were it not for all the vast empty space in between those stars.
Pluto's status as a planet was changed but should not have been. The rule that the IAU instituted was actually offered up years before and was struck down and should not have been brought back up. And when the IAU voted on the rules to describe what constituted a planet , it was during a week long seminar and the subject wasn't on the itinerary until after most of the group that was there had left (most of the American astronomers). Then, when they left, that's when the subject came up and was then voted on. Basically, a case of planetary apartheid.
It’s a classic case of voter fraud. The IAU wanted to get their way, so they made the vote secretive with a small sample size. They brought up the “clearing the neighborhood” criterion because that would help them keep the total number of planets limited and remove the small planets beyond Neptune. That criterion was initially deemed unscientific centuries beforehand because it came from astrology, but the IAU used it anyway. So now ASTRONOMERS are using a planet definition from ASTROLOGY. It’s unscientific, but they use it anyway. Their excuse is that if we use the scientific definition, there’d be “too many” planets to memorize. It’s a laughing stock and an embarrassment to science. 🤦🏻♂️
I can drift off peacefully to sleep with these videos and then watch them again the next day, giving my full attention and both options are perfect for me. I also love that there isn't any jarring loud music or sound that wakes me up after I've already had a difficult time falling asleep. Nice work!!! Keep it up.
Why is Pluto the ninth planet? It isn't always about size. How warm is warm? Or, how damp is damp? Just as warm and damp are general terms, so is the word planet. The real problem is with the AIU. They need to come up with a scientific word that they would use in place of planet. There is a difference between when water freezes and boils. If we can fine tune these parameters all the better, it would be appropriate. Where the problem of Pluto comes into being is that the IAU is trying to change a general word into a specific definition. They have no authority to do so. It would be more appropriate for a body of lexiconists to redefine the definition than some self appointed scientists. Anders Celsius decided to define temperature in a specific manner called Centigrade. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit decided to define temperature in a different way called the Fahrenheit scale. Each had their reasons. This is what the IAU should do instead of stealing from the public. There has been a semi-attempt to create a differential term for the various sizes of orbital bodies by the AIU. The attempt is some of most embarrassing efforts that even a grade schooler's attempt would far exceed this group's. Pluto stands as a planet.
@@james8449100 Part of the reasoning behind the AIU is to abuse. No all, but some. I am strongly bothered when definitions are changed. The more this happens the easier it will be to change the words which we all live by, such as the words in the U. S. Constitution. If we look at the Constitution of the former Soviet Union most of us would be very comfortable following it. To bad the government of the Soviet Union didn't. This is why I am concerned. Let us both watch and see what the next major change in definition that will happen. I could very well imagine that the next redefinition may be more serious. Be safe.
@@Original_Old_Farmerso if scientific advancements and new discoveries give us better or more accurate information, we can't use that new information to refine or reclassify things because you are afraid of changing definitions? Wtf?
@@Original_Old_Farmerso if scientific advancements and new discoveries give us new or more accurate information, we can't use that new information to refine our knowledge base or reclassify stuff because you are afraid of changing definitions? What?
@@enadegheeghaghe6369 Good question. I am for creating new words for new definitions. This is different than fine tuning let's say the freezing point of water. I think we can agree on that. Fine tune away. When I explain the importances of definitions when dealing with the United States Constitution, if the words stay the same but the definnition changes, you have just had the Constitution invalidate you. The AIU made a grievous mistake by not creating their own word that is specific. So am I afraid of changing definitons? DAMN STRAIGHT I AM, AND YOU SHOULD BE, TOO!
The most interesting thing about it is definitely the odd orbital path, and the way it intersects closer to the sun than Neptune sometimes. It's unlikely we'd be able to get pictures of them close together, with high resolution detail on Pluto with a big blue object in the bg, but it would be a neat thing for people to see someday. As for Hubble, I'd as soon compare it to asking someone farsighted to read a book only a few inches from the face. You could never focus on it that well until the book was at a more comfortable distance, but in the meanwhile that book is also perceptively wobbling, and moving just that little bit too fast to track easily. The weird yellowish blob is good enough, and pretty impressive given the technical constraints that were probably present at the time.
One more question I have about Pluto: why is it red? I grew up learning that it was made more or less entirely of ice, so I am curious about how it gets those bright red colours. I assume it is some sort of organic compound, but knowing specifically what they are would be interesting :-)
The reds are produced by chemicals called tholins, which are a mixture of various hydrocarbon polymers that form when simpler carbon-containing molecules (like methane, ethane, carbon dioxide...) are irradiated by UV light. Because tholins form from smaller molecules joining together more or less at random, there's no specific formula - a bit like tar - but it seems like in large enough quantity the hydrocarbon mixture tends towards an equilibrium point that has a generally reddish-brown colour. A particularly pretty example is Arrokoth, another Kuiper Belt object that's completely covered in tholins to the point that the whole thing is basically red :)
@@bloodyneptune if Pluto is a planet then what about ceres, vesta, Pallas, eris, Haumea, makemake, gonggong, quaoar, orcus, Sedna, ixion, salacia, Varuna, chaos, 2002 MS4 and the other hundred or so objects of similar size? dwarf planet is just another kind of celestial body, like how Jupiter is a gas giant and Neptune is an ice giant.
@@oberonpanopticon They are not similar size though thats the whole reason people are upset. Out of those 100 objects Eris is the only one of a similar size to Pluto and they are substantially bigger than the other dwarf planets. Both Eris and Pluto have moons which would be dwarf planets if they weren't moons.
@@commodorezero Have you looked at the sizes of haumea, makemake and gongong recently? They are larger in comparison to pluto than mars is in comparison to earth
@@oberonpanopticon Earth is 10 times the mass of Mars and twice the radius. The Earth and Mars are not twins. Also Haumea/possibly Sedna is the biggest of the other 98(lets say there's 98 for the sake of argument)dwarf planets and candidates. What about the rest of them? Eris and Pluto clearly stand out from that group. The crowd saying "Pluto is just 1 of many similar objects in the Kuiper Belt" are simply wrong.
For me it doesn't matter if Pluto is a planet or not. But what matters is that the rules are simple and don't make special cases just for nostalgia's sake. Like when Ceres was discovered in 1801 as 8th planet, Pallas in 1802 as 9th planet, Juno in 1804 as 10th planet and Vesta in 1807 as 11th planet. And it took almost a century for them to universally be referred to as asteroids. And the TNO situation is basically the same. We find more and more object since it's discovery in 1930 that all fulfill the same conditions. So just like in the early 19th century we had growing a number of planets in the late 20th century. So there is no way to have "just" 9 planets. If we accept Pluto, then it and Charon are have to be considered a double planet (because of their barycenter, and by some definition even the Moon), Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake and Gonggong as well and we'd end up with at least 15 planets.
Imagine if you applied the IAU Logic to biology. Any Human who was either Taller or Shorter than the Average Human. Would have to be considered a different species. That just fucking dumb. They even call the planets that not in the Solor Systems, Exo Planets. What they really think where that special.
Also the term for dwarf planets is plutoid. They literally named the category after Pluto. It seems to me they handled needing to clarify the terms pretty well and even tried to appease the people they knew who would be upset by naming the category after Pluto.
Admittedly, Pluto is on the border between a planet and a Kuiper Belt object, but I still think it is large enough and similar enough to a planet to still be considered our ninth planet.
Pluto is not, and cannot be the 9th planet, as even if you incorrectly call Pluto a planet, you would then have to call all of the other dwarf planets planets, which includes some closer to the sun like ceres, pushing Pluto down the list.
@@Why79-dx4rf the word planet is pretty arbitrary. They decided to redefine the word to exclude Pluto. So it definitely was a planet in the past. And even so the part of the definition about "clearing" the orbit is somewhat vague and depending on how you define that it could still be said to be one.
@terrybullspellr8319 it was not a redefining of a prior term, as there was no prior widely agreed upon definition, afterall, there was and is no logical way of keeping pluto as a planet whilest excluding ceres. Pluto was called a planet because it was found in Clyde's search for a non existent planet. In other words, people were expecting to find a planet, so they were going to call just about anything that was found a planet, and pluto happened to be that anything. As for clearing the neighborhood, in what way has pluto, who doesn't even make up 1/10th the mass of everything in its neighborhood, cleared its orbit?
@terrybullspellr8319 I will reiterate, there was no definition, in any capacity. There was and is no logical way to put pluto in the same category as the eight planets whilest excluding other known objects like ceres.
Thank you for this video, it's very well put together, narrated and the examples used to explain the more complicated things were great! I highly suggest Tom Cardy's H.S. Song for Pluto fans here, it's a fun spin on the demotion of Pluto as an uplifting and life affirming song for space nerds :)
Check out my BRAND NEW Displate collection of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn here: displate.com/astrumspace?art=5f04759ac338b Hopefully you can treat yourself or a space lover you know this Christma - plus 33% off if you get 3 or more before 24th Dec 2023.
WOW WOW WOW!
I'd buy one of the Andromeda galaxy show brighter than the moon, as you showed in your video! That's super cool.
There are no planets. The are just sattelites of a sun and sattelites of sattelites and so on. And every one of them is different.
Alex, what a nice garden you have, with so much space between the houses. It reminds me of the home where I grew up. There was always plenty of room for sports between two houses (both facing walls had to be sans windows.)
@RepentandbelieveinJesusChrist- Does this seem like a church meeting to you? Your statement is both irrelevant and inappropriate. Instead of your intended goal of winning converts for Christ, you're just being annoying and lazy. Dropping a random 'repent' message in an unrelated UA-cam comment is easy. Go out and walk your talk. Help feed the hungry, work to get housing for the homeless, help troubled young people who have known nothing of acceptance, kindness, and understanding in their short, wounded lives. Do something -- talk is cheap, and right now you're making a fool of yourself. Give of yourself and keep your mouth shut if you're only going to speak in slogans, nd stop being so damn annoying.
Pluto is still a planet in my heart
Exactly what my sister says
I agree
I agree!
Pluto is a planet. The leader of the dwarf planets.😊
@@thesandqueen2559 I thought that was Eris
3:21 very important visualisation, and a lot of people would benefit from watching that section in general. Galaxies aren't small, they're dim. Hubble's power is not in its ability to squint, but its attention span.
Hubble if it was gen z ☠️☠️☠️
Today I learned.
Of course the galaxies are big, so big... since when are the galaxies small?
@@ahmadsantoso9712 they're not small in the sky
can't be for real, how do you control something billions of miles away? going away from the sun with, plummeting temps I thought it was so-called meteors and space debris out there how does it deal with those temps, fuel, maintenance. How do you control let alone communicate with something that far from earth and the sun. if so-called pluto was real it would be a ball of ice.
Pluto was such a surprise - many predicted that it would be a cold, dark, bland and inactive rock but it turned out to be a very strange and complex body with active surface features.
The fact that Pluto is classified as a dwarf planet doesn't make it any less beautiful.
And since it revealed it's hard it means it still loves us.
" ... revealed its HEART ... "
Pluto makes **me** hard
@@sweetmusic3821
lol. But to be fair, it probably is pretty hard too. Being as cold as it is, any ices are likely hard as steel.
I also grew up with 9 planets scheme and felt sad when Pluto lost the title planet... Surely with the introduction of the term dwarf planet a lot of other small neighbors in the system got an identity, like Ceres let's say, but Pluto is not a spherical rock like the other dwarf planets I know of!
It is active geothermically, it has atmosphere and maybe it is even more alive than we think, certainly far more interesting than Mercury which is considered a planet being just a spherical rock orbiting the Sun, no moons no nothing. Pluto is a dual planetary system with many small moons and an orbit of its own... A unique situation in the neighborhood!
Pluto will be forever a planet in my heart now even more after we all saw Pluto's beautiful white heart drawn on its bright red soil!
Cheers from Greece! Great video as always. Jim
Agrer Mercury is basically the core of a use to planet
that makes me feel even much more respect to the guy who found pluto.
Clyde Tombaugh
Flagstaff Arizona
He gave a keynote at Stellafane 30 or so years ago... The story he told, of Pluto's discovery, will always be part of astronomy history. I don't remember any hecklers complaining that he didn't actually discover a planet, during his talk. But nerds can be sticklers about minutiae of definitions, and people back then still recognized that Pluto was somewhat different from the other outer planets... and people suspected that we might find more distant plutos with strange orbits, but so what.
Looking at the two images (featured ~11:46), I find it interesting that the one on the left seems brighter compared to the one on the right. I wonder if that aided or hindered the comparison... or perhaps didn't impact it at all? Looking at the images without a "blink comparator" (or any other aid), Pluto stands out a bit in the right image as a bright dot that should have been even brighter in the left image. Instead, it is absent... at least at the same spot in the photo.
Given that the right image appears darker, one might make the general statement that points of light on the right should appear even brighter on the left. Similarly, dim points on the left might not appear at all on the right. Conversely, if there is a bright spot on the right, one would expect it to NOT be dimmer on the left. Having said that, take a look at the right hand image and note the point of light that is approximately 32% from the left edge of the image and about 6% from the top edge of the image. As another point of reference, one of the brightest spots in the image is almost directly down from it while the other of the brightest spots is to the "east southeast" of it. Being on the right hand image, one would expect it to be on the left hand image and probably appearing even brighter in the left hand image. However, that spot of light is absent from the left hand image. I'm sure this isn't the first time someone's observed this difference over the last 90+ years, but I would be curious to know if there's a known explanation for it.
There's one other difference that I can see that defies my expectations that is in the same general area. In the left-hand image, find what I called earlier "one of the brightest spots in the image", roughly 33% from the left and 30% from the top. If you travel "north northeast" of that spot, you'll find a spot of medium brightness (less than half the diameter of the aforementioned "brightest spot", but still much brighter than most spots). If you keep following the same "north northeast" line you'll soon see yet another spot, not as bright as the "medium brightness" spot. This is the Spot of Note. Close to the left of it are two even smaller spots, one "west northwest", the other "west southwest" of the Spot of Note. To emphasize, these two spots are smaller, yet they are visible in the right hand image. However, the Spot of Note (which should theoretically be brighter than those two spots) does not appear in the right hand image.
Weird that time stamps don’t seem to work…
If it's any consolation do the Pluto fans, it went from being the smallest planet to the king of the dwarf planets.
Honestly I think being so special to the point of warranting a change to the current system of classification is more remarkable than just a planetary status.
That’s like saying going from the poorest millionaire to the richest homeless person is an upgrade. 😂
I think Eris would be a better candidate for king of the dwarf planets, seeing as it has more mass
@@robo3007 Eris is the *queen* of the dwarf planets because it’s the most massive, but Pluto is the *king* of the dwarf planets because it’s the biggest and the most famous.
@@Jellyman1129The Plutoids are awesome! Pluto is proud to be the king of them and the thing they're all named after
My grand-daughter asked me several years ago "why did they name Pluto after the Disney character". I had to explain that it was the reverse, Disney named Mickey's dog after Pluto the same year it was discovered in 1930. She is in college now and is a lot better informed then she used to be!
Pluto is actually another name for the ancient Greek underworld god Hades.
Give her a lollipop 🍭
Pluto was a planet when it gave the world success. Now its not a planet when nations falling😂😂😂
This is so sweet! The memories of growing up:) I’m glad she’s doing well & informed now, lol!
She’s actually probably worse off now than she was then. 🎉
Like only if you were born when Pluto was still a planet
I wasn’t born till a year later 😕
1999
I was born in Pluto was still the eighth closest planet to the sun
I found out in 2013 that Pluto was classified as a dwarf planet in 2006 that was when I started to get back into astronomy
1981 so still hard to believe it’s not a planet
Agree if you want to add Pluto as 9th planet of our solar system 👍
Of course it's a planet with solar orbit rotation gravity and moons. Fulfills the requirements.
Pluto is the 9th planet.
Someone should make a VR or AR program to view galaxies more brightly, would be amazing! You could shift from visible light to infrared etc
I mean there is Space engine, but I'm not sure if it does everything you said here
@@banu6301 cool, sounds interesting! I'll look into it thanks
You're on to something.
we're going to need waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay better passthrough cameras
@@GraveUypoalso needs a decent lowlight performance to match our vision
Once i saw detailed images of Pluto my mind was blown! I was not expecting that level of geological diversity, mineralization, signs of geologic activity, etc. Pluto has proven to be one of the most dynamic objects in our solar system. Only a few moons come close to Pluto's features. It makes me wonder what systems are fueling these dynamic aspects on Pluto? Is it tidal forces? Is it chemical reactions between different minerals? Is it certain elements that transition between solid ice form/liquid form/etc. depending on the pressure, friction, temperature it's experiencing? I'm really hoping to see a lot more research being done there. Pluto is s million times more interesting than Mars. Something that far away from the sun, it's amazing it's got interesting stuff occuring at all. I feel like there is a lot we can learn from Pluto.
Those are really great questions ! 😊
Interesting thoughts.
The question is, are those ongoing processes or just the aftermath of something in the past.
Four theories:
1. Pluto is still differentiating, like Earth did during the Hadian.
2. Pluto had a significant change in it's orbit in the last few million years. Perhaps getting almost captured by Neptune from being a long period comet, and the constant solar radiation has allowed it to begin to differentiate.
3. Pluto had a massive collision in the last few million years, perhaps being the origin of Charon too.
4. Due to some quirk of how our rare ordered solar system formed, Pluto happens to have an outsized amount of radioactive materials. Pluto is a big RTG.
Yeah, I'm gonna be honest I was let down by astrum answering questions such simple questions, from title I thought it was gonna be more about this stuff
Pluto being demoted from planet status had rather annoyed me as I grew up solidly with nine planets. But now that I know that the demotion is due to the discovery of an entire other asteroid belt, I feel privileged to have lived during the time of that discovery. Thanks for the education!
The discovery of the Kuiper Belt isn’t what led to Pluto’s demotion. What led to Pluto’s demotion was a bunch of inexperienced astronomers being scared of having the number of planets reach double digits. It was an irrational and unscientific move. Pluto is a planet.
Agreed
@@ajaynair2636 thing is, at the time of its discovery, Pluto was the only Kuiper Belt object that we knew of. We thought it was the one and only, and thus was befitting to be called a planet.
If we discovered Pluto first among the Asteroid Belt, then further discovery would also lead to the demotion of Pluto by the discovery of the A Belt, too. Not too dissimilar from the so called "planets" in the 1800s textbooks when we only knew of a few object in the Asteroid Belt that were also later demoted.
I’m still salty, though.
@@binhturtle179 Disvovering an asteroid belt doesn’t invalidate the planetary features of Pluto. Nearby asteroids have never demoted a planet, so why would the order of discovery make a difference?
Okay but the butternut squash and the kiwi taped to a stick was the funniest thing I've seen all day.
What an amusing vegetable and fruit pairing.
I remember my daughter drawing Pluto in her school Science text book on a page containing information about eight planets of the Solar System and self reinstating it as the ninth planet . She was 9 then.
The tiramisu dwarf-planet with a heart. I think it's fascinating and the fact it's active is really exciting - what else is out there.
Tiramisu-flavoured or coloured?
@@kohlinoorIdiot.
Send Wallace and Gromit, they discovered the moon didn't really taste like cheese.
@@edwarddore7617 Crackin' cheese, Gromit.
Humans with the Pluto birth mark 🤎🎉
A tour of the dwarf planets would be fun
Agreed!
I can't wait for the International Astronomical Union downgrade Peter Dinklage from Human to Dwarf Human. And then say has no longer a Human.
@@UA-camHarborsLUNATICSyour profile picture is extremely fitting
You mean “Planets That Are Past Neptune That No One Wants To Admit Are Planets”?
@@UA-camHarborsLUNATICSthen Ceres should be to.
Every generation before us really had no idea how any of the planets actually looked in "Natural Light" 😉; and now every generation after us can spend their time on new questions.🧐
It has been an incredible 60 years! 🤯🤯
Thank you for these essays.
I used Pluto for my speech at college,broke down it's founding, why it was an important find both before and after photos with the new horizon satellite and what makes up Pluto
The first time when I was a kid and I discovered there are more planets in our solar system after Pluto, Eris was the first one I learned about. This marked me so much that fast forward to three years ago when my cat was born, I named her Eris. I know it's after the greek princess of discordia, but it's such a cute and easy to pronounce name, the cat learned it in about 3 weeks.
I love Eris! Her existence is the easiest argument against the silliness of the Pluto lovers that stubbornly insist that Pluto is still a planet and should be somehow listed with the other 8.
I cannot even begin to describe how excited I was about the New Horizons images of Pluto. I remember seeing a picture of Pluto in 1995, at a field trip to the planetarium. It was white, highly pixellated, and looked almost like an upside-down snowman with the moon Charon underneath it. This was believed to be Pluto's ONLY moon at the time.
I love this stuff but have difficulty grasping the distances and sizes, so the garden analogy really helped me understand better.
Welcome to astronomy! We all struggle at times to wrap our minds around distance in space.
New Horizons was one of the most exciting things, of many, that humanity did in space.
Agreed, along with the Huygens lander from the Cassini mission, landing on Titan.
Images from both New Horizons and Huygens blew my mind.
@@crxtodd16 I'm (unfortunately) old enough to remember black and white TV transmissions of astronauts on the Moon. It's definitely the latter missions and in color, but we had a BW TV :)
That was exciting and marked me for life/ So the Artemis stuff is also moving my blood.
@@borisbabichyou should consider yourself fortunate, you were witness to some of the first moments in human history when we were visiting another world
@chrisgristle7014 I do. And it has marked me, my imagination, and it fuelled my love for the cosmos. But I regret the decades lost and wonder what else I'll get to see before I go off after the Voyagers. 😊
Pluto was a planet when it gave the world success. Now its not a planet when nations falling😂😂😂
Pluto kicks ass.
Hyped for the Titan drone thingy!
IT WILL ALWAYS BE THE NINTH PLANET TO ME. MY FAVORITE PLANET. ❤❤
05:35 There's another reason why Earth-based (both on or near Earth) telescopes have hard time imaging Pluto that Alex didn't mention:
The galaxies and stars are sources of lights (IR to UV to Radio and higher wavelengths) thus they are easier to see, versus Pluto which is mostly (99.99+%) illuminated by what little amounts of sunlight that managed to reach Pluto AND reflects off it back to Earth. That rule about light getting weaker the further light travels applies to BOTH travel directions out from the Sun to Pluto AND back to Earth.
This coupled with the incredibly tiny apparant relative size in the sky makes Pluto so durned hard to see.
PS: the remaining
I’d love to collect space soil from a local rocky body and grow something in it! Or bring earth soil to another rocky body and learn how the microbes evolve under a variety of conditions
Good luck growing something in what’s basically dust made of broken glass, or getting microbes to survive without liquid water
@@oberonpanopticon yeah totally it's not like when you grow something you give it water or anything
pretty sure there'd be alot of radiaion on that.
@@zarahalora7567 Irradiated ≠ radioactive
Not all the time, at least
Do you understand how on our life infested earth, different soils impact greatly what can grow on it? Well the most baron place on earth lets say your bleached microwave constantly running for a century at the top of mount Everest is a more appropriate place for life than the best place and time on Mars.
I just wanted to say a general thank you for all of your videos and the amount of effort and time you put into them it doesn’t go unnoticed
Hopefully, this particular video, didn't actually teach you anything new, as all these concepts are brutally simple and unless you watch 1 astronomy vid per year, nothing in this vid should be remotely new - this is basically kindergarten common sense stuff (perhaps except the IAU, though the reasoning behind dethroning Pluto has been rehashed hundreds times (for obvious reasons))
This is so incredibly calming!!! Thank you very much!!
To the person who makes these videos, I am so impressed. You’re very professional., lovely to listen to, explain things so well, you’re a real gem. Thank you for all that you do and post.. see you in the stars
Excellent video...
Nice to see a clear picture of Pluto without his ears...
5:37 In this one scenario you should be pronouncing Charon as Sharon despite the relation to the Greek ferryman to the underworld. James Christy, the discoverer of Charon, wanted to name it after his wife Charlene (pronounced Sharlene) but obviously he couldn't name it Charlene due to naming conventions around Greek and Roman gods for celestial bodies. So the decision was Charon pronounced Sharon. NASA uses his pronunciation. All astrophiles ought know this story.
That's why I keep calling Uranus "George", just as Herschel intended ;)
Which ironically brings it closer to the pronunciation of Charon in (ancient) greek. I first didn’t get the name until I saw it written out and then I thought neat, just like the ferryman.
I think the British opt for the Greek pronunciation and they don't feel bound to follow the pronunciation of the Americans or NASA.
I don't know what you normally make, but MORE LIKE THIS PLEASE.
pluto identifies as a planet
😂
😅😅
I’m always surprised just how big some of those ‘nearby’ galaxies look from Earth. Love seeing these comparisons!!
Neptune and Uranus really interest me because I wonder if there is some superfluid happening in their atmospheres.
They are pretty far away from the Sun so they might be cold enough.
Now I want to know more about Ceres and other kuiper belt objects with pluto
Thank You for explaining size and illumination questions. These are not explained much elsewhere at all.
Scale and relativity matters with each of our observations.
Why is Pluto the cutest planet? ❤
It's the most babygirl princess indie planet ever, we love him
Pluto and Charon are my favorite astral bodies. They’re very endearing, dancing around each other, somewhere so dark and quiet. Their private little corner of space. So private and comfortable in their privacy, and still so full of love. I don’t think Pluto’s heart is for us. We don’t know it intimately enough for that.
Jesus H. It isn’t porn, fella. Simmer down.
Thank you for acknowledging Ceres. It meant more to me than you could possible understand. Have a wonderful aphelion season!
I loved this video, alot of times we have questions, so it's nice to have someone put the answers in simple terms. Loved it! Keep it up
Excellent presentation as usual. Thank you for answering questions I didn't know I had. Merry Christmas and a prosperous New Year to one and all.
Totally agree!
Pluto will always be my 9th planet in my heart
I really appreciated the excellent explanation of the orbit and gravity pull between a smaller planet and larger moon, for instance. I also did not know the sun was influenced by Jupiter’s gravity, cool!
Best space science channel on UA-cam. Every video is extremely well written and presented. Congrats Alex. Job well done. 👍
Superb - thank you for the understanding you have brought me over this orbit of the sun.
07:25 Another object that has a noticable wobble around a barycenter is the Earth Moon system, which is located about 1000 miles under your feet (OR put another way, about 2900 miles from the Earth's center, which is about 75% of Earth's radius).
No other planets besides Pluto has a barycenter that's a noticable distance away from the planet's core. That's because no other two objects in the Solar System involving a Planet has such large relative masses between the planet and it's satellite.
Except for Jupiter and the Sun, where the roles are swapped with Jupiter being the satellite around the Sun. The Sun/Jupiter barycenter is JUST above the Sun's surface at around 30,271 miles (or 107% of the Solar radius).
Barycenter expert?
Uranus has a wobble too...when you run.
Pluto is not a planet.
Jupiter is not a satellite.
I love space. I learned Pluto as the 9th planet when I was in grade school.
Q: Five: why don't we yet recognize that Pluto and Charon made physical contact? If people get mad at my question then look into how Sputnik Planitia formed and Charon has a huge red stain that does not look like a deposit from floating dust.
The world needed the visual demonstration of center of gravity using a stick, a squash, and a kiwi. Thank you for that.
The thing people dont realize is that if you were magically placed outside our galaxy, with your back to our galaxy, you might see a faint smudge or two. Other than that it would be unending darkness.
In dark places the sky is awash with stars and celestial bodies at night on Earth. If you were in space you would see that even better.
False. You have failed in your attempt at being sciency. Realize that.
@Safetytrousers With your back to our galaxy.
@@ustmissouri8029 I did miss that, but what you would see would be many other galaxies as their light would be clear against the blackness. Four other galaxies can be seen from Earth with the naked eye.
@Safetytrousers Hence the faint smudge or two.... or .... I think we're both on the same page though.
For those still holding on to hope, there are some problems with the newer planet classification guidelines. For one thing, they were made by astronomers and not planetologists. For another, if you put any of the inner planets into Pluto's orbit, they would not have the mass to clear that orbit of other large bodies.
I really love the planets but I can’t wait for me to pass this subject thank you so much ❤ for your love
Another fantastic video from you, Alex. Thanks.
I'd like to know more about the motions of all the dwarf planets and potential collisions or orbital changes that could potentially occur.
the IAU is very slow with giving out dwarf planet titles officially but theres roughly 4 types in the kuiper belt (not counting ceres, from most to least found):
cubewanos: or classical kuiper belt objects, fairly close fairly circular orbits mostly. including makemake and haumea
resonance kuiper belt objects: they have a resonance orbit with neptune, some are more common and got a fancy name. plutinos have a 2/3 resonance for example and include pluto, twotinos ahve a 1/2 resonance. same fairly close but tend to have higher inclinations
scattered disk: objects with high inclination and eccentricity. usually further out, this includes eris the heaviest dwarf planet known.
the last category is very sparse and goes by several names like detached disk, extreme scattered disk, sednoids, inner oort cloud objects or hill cloud object. these are far away and sometimes have very extreme eccentricities or inclinations depending on the type and include sedna
there are hundreds of these things known, most dont even have names. they run the gamut of being pretty big to snowball sized.
In terms of orbital changes, one specific interesting example is Neptune's largest moon Triton, which was probably ejected from the Kuiper Belt and then captured by Neptune's gravity. Physically, Triton is incredibly similar to Pluto and any future mission to Neptune would have the fringe benefit of basically being able to study a second Kuiper Belt object for free
Pluto is honestly one of my favourite dwarf planets, right up there with Haumea, Makemake, Eris, Ceres, and Sedna
Don't forget the cakecake and appleapple too.
To me the main interest of Ceres over the other dwarf planets is that it's accessible. It's already been thoroughly mapped and examined by an orbiting spacecraft and it's not much farther out and colder than Mars so it could be a better target for human exploration than Mars where much stronger gravity makes leaving so much harder.
Very interesting and well put together. Absolutely a great format. ❤
I still think of Pluto as a planet. The 3rd criteria is dubious. I love your videos. Keep up the great work.
All great information. My only issue is that my wife's college professor stated in one of her courses that the term "naked eye" is not the correct term for eyes without aid. The term that should be used is "an unaided eye," meaning obviously the eye without any aid. Unfortunately, this drives her crazy because everyone uses the term incorrectly. I told her I believe it is because people like to say naked.😂
A new triva fact I recently heard, since we have discovered Pluto, it has yet to complete one orbital year...
Not even half of a year, in fact.
It's bad enough poor Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet, but now it's the laziest. Taking it's time going around the sun.
It takes 247.9 Earth years for Pluto to make one orbit around the Sun, at an average speed of 10,623 miles per hour (17,096 kilometers per hour) ❤ Pluto ❤ don't worry what others say you have all the time in the universe (to grow big and fast) Time is at your side (enjoy)
On a related note, Neptune was discovered in 1846. It took until 2011 to complete an orbit.
This is one my favorite UA-cam channels 💫🙏
I like to define a planet as a permanent solar system body with more than 2000 km diameter. The list of 17 planets would look like this:
ORBIT AROUND THE SUN: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Eris
ORBIT ANOTHER PLANET: Moon, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa, Titan, Triton
I think this would encourage children and everyone to learn and amaze more at our solar system bodies, despite what they orbit around
Moons orbit planets though.
You listed only 16, not 17.
@@ChristomirRackov count again!
@@Darkfawfulx the biggest moons can totally be planets orbiting other planets
@eliasmondino I feel like it's a meaningful difference for categorization. Honestly it wouldn't bother me for a planet to be something that orbits the Sun that is gravitationally rounded.
It has a heart looking out to the universe. It's still a planet for most.
I like this. It provides me with new, useful, interesting information without getting dry and sailing right over my head----well done!
Pluto is probably the reason we’re all here and all these scientists just threw it away…
Reclassified. Not thrown away.
Lol
Here's a hot take, not only is Pluto still a planet, but Charon is too! Hail the binary planets Pluto and Charon!
The issue with this if Pluto becomes a planet Charon most likely will not meet the new bar for planethood unless they go with the dwarf planet definition which they won't cause theres too many of them. Being a binary system doesn't make the junior partner a planet they still are judged individually. Charon is a dwarf planet moon even if Pluto becomes a planet because if Charon wasn't a moon it'd be a dwarf planet.
@@commodorezerowell the terms are arbitrary, they're all large terrestrial rock bodies.
@@declaringpond2276 Of course they're arbitrary. Everything we do with classifying things in science is arbitrary that's why people need to stop being so precious about it when these things need to be adjusted to make them more useful. Pluto's new category literally also has the term plutoid, they literally made its name the term for the category and people still can't let that change go.
Pluto is a really cool planet.
pluto is an amazingly cool dwarf planet
How many planets do you think there are in the Solar System?
Cool? Downright cold. And dwarf or not it's certainly one of the most fascinating objects in the Solar System.
@@ChristomirRackovafter the ninth planet ( Pluto ) there’s a tenth one farther out.
@@Digikidthevoiceofreason Yeah, it is called Eris. And then there is an 11th one, named Sedna, 12th one, named Makemake, etc.
Seriously, I cant, with you guys...
Pluto will always be a planet to me
I would like a video of how bright the planets look from each other, as if we were on them. I assume the brightest would be seeing Venus when on Mercury. If Venus had a clear atmosphere I assume seeing Earth from it would be the next brightest. Having our view of Venus, Jupiter and Mars as a reference for each view would be helpful. Nobody has seemed to have done this comparative viewpoint.
The ending of this shows something important to keep in mind, science is always changing as we learn more. It reminds me of the Semmelweis story where he discovered hand washing decreased childbirth deaths, but other doctors didn't believe him and continued to infect and kill mothers because they didn't learn about it in school.
I'd love to see a video about New Horizons post Pluto? Great video as ever.
I have a better question regarding Pluto because I know why it was downgraded. That question is simply this: Why are we placing artificial and what appear to be entirely arbitrary limits on the number of planets a solar system can have? What difference does it make if it's 8 or 800? This, I believe, is what the science community failed to consider when they made the decision to relegate Pluto. Nonetheless, planet or not, I find it a thoroughly fascinating world.
That is OK - if you want, you can say there are hundreds of planets, and then Pluto, Eris, Makemake, would indeed be listed in that category too. BUT then there will still be a subcategory of that - Main planets, or whatever you wanna call them. And they would still be only 8, not 9, because Pluto would not belong to them.
There is no way that you or the Pluto fans can twist this to somehow make it true that Pluto belongs with the other 8 (no matter what you call them), BUT Eris, Makemake and the others dont - that would not make any sense and would simply contradict what science has found out about them. If Pluto belongs, then those others belong too.
So, you see, it is not a question of whether we call Pluto a PLANET or not, and how many planets there are in the Solar System - that is just arguing semantics, and doesnt matter. What matters is which other Solar System bodies it should be grouped with, and that question has been resolved - definitely NOT with those 8 (not matter if they are called planets, main planets or whatever). There simply isnt that group of 9 that people thought there were, from 1930 to 2006, because of Pluto being lucky to be randomly discovered 70 years before the others of its actual group :)
In school we had models of our solar system, the 9 PLANET has always been my favorite, the most outer planet, small but it has a certain personality, to me anyway.
This is really good stuff. For the past 20 or so years, when people find out I'm a professional astronomer, their first question is usually, "What happened to Pluto?" My standard smart-alec answer is "Nothing. It's still there." If that doesn't drive them away, I often use the asteroid-Kuiper belt comparison. When the IAU was working on this, there was more than a little sentiment to keep Pluto as a planet, being "grandfathered" in 1930. But no.
PLUTO IS A PLANET AND ALWAYS WILL BE
NOOOOOO YOU SHATTERED THE ENTIRE PLUTO’S NOT A PLANET ARGUEMENT 😮😮😢
100% a dwarf planet. Like little people are still humans
@@AfroGalactiKa exactly.
Damn right...
Then what are Eris and Makemake, in your opinion? Are they also planets?
How many planets do you think there are in the Solar System?
This is answering some of the most asked and liked questions I've found on my Pluto videos. I'm interested to hear if you like this format, and if you'd enjoy more videos like this exploring your questions. Find Pluto time where you are here: plutotime.app/ (the website on NASA I used originally when making the video has sadly closed down, but this seems to be a good alternative. I'm not affiliated with this website.)
Just like your last 322 videos, fantastic video.
Question.. Is Pluto still considered an enemy planet or was it really ever? Maybe Im thinking about Jupiter? Thanks again, Cheers.
I really enjoyed this format. It's really useful for helping us understand how astronomers come to the conclusions they do about these things.
I love all your videos and the Displate designs you are are very pretty. Keep up all the good work you do.
To ask another question in general, will you be finishing the series on spirit?
I think it's a great idea to use questions by viewers of your past content as fuel for future content.
Dwarf planet? No! But a Hobbit planet?? YES!!
A Yoda planet.
On question 1, there is a second important factor making stars and galaxies more visible than objects like Pluto that you did not mention. They glow by their own light, Pluto does not, and the light it gets from the sun is pretty dim - much dimmer than something slowing with the light of billions of suns. The difference would be even greater were it not for all the vast empty space in between those stars.
Wow amazing. When I was in grade school, I did a report on Pluto I was amazed thanks and now a subscriber
no planet has cleared it's neighborhood around it's orbit
Not until you realize what that term actually implies.
@@Релёкс84There are three different definitions for the criterion. *Nobody* knows what the heck it’s supposed to mean!
Pluto was, is and will always be a planet.....
Pluto's status as a planet was changed but should not have been. The rule that the IAU instituted was actually offered up years before and was struck down and should not have been brought back up. And when the IAU voted on the rules to describe what constituted a planet , it was during a week long seminar and the subject wasn't on the itinerary until after most of the group that was there had left (most of the American astronomers). Then, when they left, that's when the subject came up and was then voted on. Basically, a case of planetary apartheid.
It’s a classic case of voter fraud. The IAU wanted to get their way, so they made the vote secretive with a small sample size. They brought up the “clearing the neighborhood” criterion because that would help them keep the total number of planets limited and remove the small planets beyond Neptune. That criterion was initially deemed unscientific centuries beforehand because it came from astrology, but the IAU used it anyway. So now ASTRONOMERS are using a planet definition from ASTROLOGY. It’s unscientific, but they use it anyway. Their excuse is that if we use the scientific definition, there’d be “too many” planets to memorize. It’s a laughing stock and an embarrassment to science. 🤦🏻♂️
This is the best way he explains, perfectly explained, PERFECT 👌🏽
I can drift off peacefully to sleep with these videos and then watch them again the next day, giving my full attention and both options are perfect for me. I also love that there isn't any jarring loud music or sound that wakes me up after I've already had a difficult time falling asleep. Nice work!!! Keep it up.
Why is Pluto the ninth planet? It isn't always about size. How warm is warm? Or, how damp is damp? Just as warm and damp are general terms, so is the word planet. The real problem is with the AIU. They need to come up with a scientific word that they would use in place of planet. There is a difference between when water freezes and boils. If we can fine tune these parameters all the better, it would be appropriate. Where the problem of Pluto comes into being is that the IAU is trying to change a general word into a specific definition. They have no authority to do so. It would be more appropriate for a body of lexiconists to redefine the definition than some self appointed scientists. Anders Celsius decided to define temperature in a specific manner called Centigrade. Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit decided to define temperature in a different way called the Fahrenheit scale. Each had their reasons. This is what the IAU should do instead of stealing from the public. There has been a semi-attempt to create a differential term for the various sizes of orbital bodies by the AIU. The attempt is some of most embarrassing efforts that even a grade schooler's attempt would far exceed this group's. Pluto stands as a planet.
Why is this important to you
@@james8449100 Part of the reasoning behind the AIU is to abuse. No all, but some. I am strongly bothered when definitions are changed. The more this happens the easier it will be to change the words which we all live by, such as the words in the U. S. Constitution. If we look at the Constitution of the former Soviet Union most of us would be very comfortable following it. To bad the government of the Soviet Union didn't. This is why I am concerned. Let us both watch and see what the next major change in definition that will happen. I could very well imagine that the next redefinition may be more serious. Be safe.
@@Original_Old_Farmerso if scientific advancements and new discoveries give us better or more accurate information, we can't use that new information to refine or reclassify things because you are afraid of changing definitions? Wtf?
@@Original_Old_Farmerso if scientific advancements and new discoveries give us new or more accurate information, we can't use that new information to refine our knowledge base or reclassify stuff because you are afraid of changing definitions? What?
@@enadegheeghaghe6369 Good question. I am for creating new words for new definitions. This is different than fine tuning let's say the freezing point of water. I think we can agree on that. Fine tune away. When I explain the importances of definitions when dealing with the United States Constitution, if the words stay the same but the definnition changes, you have just had the Constitution invalidate you. The AIU made a grievous mistake by not creating their own word that is specific. So am I afraid of changing definitons? DAMN STRAIGHT I AM, AND YOU SHOULD BE, TOO!
Pluto is planet !!!!!
I have questions about Pluto.
I have answers about non-Pluto.
...we don't seem to have a compatible situation here.
😕
The big heart on Pluto shows that even if you don't love Pluto, Pluto still loves you.
The most interesting thing about it is definitely the odd orbital path, and the way it intersects closer to the sun than Neptune sometimes. It's unlikely we'd be able to get pictures of them close together, with high resolution detail on Pluto with a big blue object in the bg, but it would be a neat thing for people to see someday. As for Hubble, I'd as soon compare it to asking someone farsighted to read a book only a few inches from the face. You could never focus on it that well until the book was at a more comfortable distance, but in the meanwhile that book is also perceptively wobbling, and moving just that little bit too fast to track easily. The weird yellowish blob is good enough, and pretty impressive given the technical constraints that were probably present at the time.
Still a planet in my ❤
there is a really really interesting moon out there called Iapetus. I highly recommend you to find out more and maybe make a video about it.
Yeah I agree, that one's a sleeper.
Pluto is a planet bro.
Of course it is. Votes don’t determine scientific facts.
@@Jellyman1129 Covid clearly taught us that votes clearly make scientific facts...
@@CafeSquirrel Only if you listen to politicians.
Long live planet Pluto
One more question I have about Pluto: why is it red? I grew up learning that it was made more or less entirely of ice, so I am curious about how it gets those bright red colours. I assume it is some sort of organic compound, but knowing specifically what they are would be interesting :-)
The reds are produced by chemicals called tholins, which are a mixture of various hydrocarbon polymers that form when simpler carbon-containing molecules (like methane, ethane, carbon dioxide...) are irradiated by UV light. Because tholins form from smaller molecules joining together more or less at random, there's no specific formula - a bit like tar - but it seems like in large enough quantity the hydrocarbon mixture tends towards an equilibrium point that has a generally reddish-brown colour. A particularly pretty example is Arrokoth, another Kuiper Belt object that's completely covered in tholins to the point that the whole thing is basically red :)
Hey i bought this displate and the print is much lower quality than i expected. Your vids are much better !
While I fully accept and approve of Pluto's Dwarf Planet status, it will always be a planet in my heart. 🥰
Dont accept it, that's what they _want_
@@bloodyneptune if Pluto is a planet then what about ceres, vesta, Pallas, eris, Haumea, makemake, gonggong, quaoar, orcus, Sedna, ixion, salacia, Varuna, chaos, 2002 MS4 and the other hundred or so objects of similar size?
dwarf planet is just another kind of celestial body, like how Jupiter is a gas giant and Neptune is an ice giant.
@@oberonpanopticon They are not similar size though thats the whole reason people are upset. Out of those 100 objects Eris is the only one of a similar size to Pluto and they are substantially bigger than the other dwarf planets. Both Eris and Pluto have moons which would be dwarf planets if they weren't moons.
@@commodorezero Have you looked at the sizes of haumea, makemake and gongong recently?
They are larger in comparison to pluto than mars is in comparison to earth
@@oberonpanopticon Earth is 10 times the mass of Mars and twice the radius. The Earth and Mars are not twins. Also Haumea/possibly Sedna is the biggest of the other 98(lets say there's 98 for the sake of argument)dwarf planets and candidates. What about the rest of them? Eris and Pluto clearly stand out from that group. The crowd saying "Pluto is just 1 of many similar objects in the Kuiper Belt" are simply wrong.
For me it doesn't matter if Pluto is a planet or not.
But what matters is that the rules are simple and don't make special cases just for nostalgia's sake.
Like when Ceres was discovered in 1801 as 8th planet, Pallas in 1802 as 9th planet, Juno in 1804 as 10th planet and Vesta in 1807 as 11th planet. And it took almost a century for them to universally be referred to as asteroids.
And the TNO situation is basically the same. We find more and more object since it's discovery in 1930 that all fulfill the same conditions. So just like in the early 19th century we had growing a number of planets in the late 20th century.
So there is no way to have "just" 9 planets. If we accept Pluto, then it and Charon are have to be considered a double planet (because of their barycenter, and by some definition even the Moon), Ceres, Eris, Haumea, Makemake and Gonggong as well and we'd end up with at least 15 planets.
Imagine if you applied the IAU Logic to biology. Any Human who was either Taller or Shorter than the Average Human. Would have to be considered a different species. That just fucking dumb. They even call the planets that not in the Solor Systems, Exo Planets. What they really think where that special.
Also the term for dwarf planets is plutoid. They literally named the category after Pluto. It seems to me they handled needing to clarify the terms pretty well and even tried to appease the people they knew who would be upset by naming the category after Pluto.
Admittedly, Pluto is on the border between a planet and a Kuiper Belt object, but I still think it is large enough and similar enough to a planet to still be considered our ninth planet.
Pluto is not, and cannot be the 9th planet, as even if you incorrectly call Pluto a planet, you would then have to call all of the other dwarf planets planets, which includes some closer to the sun like ceres, pushing Pluto down the list.
@@Why79-dx4rf the word planet is pretty arbitrary. They decided to redefine the word to exclude Pluto. So it definitely was a planet in the past. And even so the part of the definition about "clearing" the orbit is somewhat vague and depending on how you define that it could still be said to be one.
@terrybullspellr8319 it was not a redefining of a prior term, as there was no prior widely agreed upon definition, afterall, there was and is no logical way of keeping pluto as a planet whilest excluding ceres. Pluto was called a planet because it was found in Clyde's search for a non existent planet. In other words, people were expecting to find a planet, so they were going to call just about anything that was found a planet, and pluto happened to be that anything.
As for clearing the neighborhood, in what way has pluto, who doesn't even make up 1/10th the mass of everything in its neighborhood, cleared its orbit?
@Why79-dx4rf just because there is no "official" scientific definition before doesn't mean there was not one before.
@terrybullspellr8319 I will reiterate, there was no definition, in any capacity. There was and is no logical way to put pluto in the same category as the eight planets whilest excluding other known objects like ceres.
Thank you for this video, it's very well put together, narrated and the examples used to explain the more complicated things were great!
I highly suggest Tom Cardy's H.S. Song for Pluto fans here, it's a fun spin on the demotion of Pluto as an uplifting and life affirming song for space nerds :)
I’ll be keeping Pluto as a planet, thank you very much.