Pluto: The Story of A Dwarf Planet | Abdullah Al Moinee

Abdullah Al Moinee

[ http://www.daily-sun.com/home/printnews/86918 ]

The conquest of the solar system is a one giant leap for mankind. The universe is everything that exists from the smallest particle on earth to the vast galaxies of deep space. We are the way for the cosmos to know itself. The Pluto is one of the illuminated kingdoms at Solar System in the Milky Way. Mystery creates wonder and wonder is the basis of man's desire to know which opens the threshold for Pluto with curious chronicles. Pluto is approximately 4.6 billion years old, about the same age as the rest of the solar system. For 76 years, Pluto was considered a planet. However, when astronomers discovered that it was just one of many large objects within the Kuiper belt, Pluto was renamed a “dwarf planet” in 2006. Officially, Pluto’s name is now asteroid number 134340 after being downgraded from a planet to a dwarf planet. Dwarf planets are one type of astronomical object catalogued as an asteroid. The dwarf planet Pluto is named after the ancient Roman god of the underworld. In Roman mythology, Pluto was the son of Saturn who, with his three brothers, controlled the world: Jupiter controlled the sky, Neptune controlled the sea, and Pluto ruled the underworld. When Pluto was discovered in 1930, many people wrote in suggesting names for the new planet. Some suggestions were Cronus, Persephone, Erebus, Atlas, and Prometheus. Eleven-year-old Venetia Burney suggested the name Pluto. She thought it would be a good name since Pluto is so dark and far away, like the god of the underworld. On May 1, 1930, the name Pluto became official, and that little girl received a £5 note as a reward. Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh—who worked in the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona—discovered Pluto on February 18, 1930. Tombaugh was only 24 when he discovered it.

The official symbol for Pluto are the interlocking letters of P and L, which not only stand for the first two letters of the planet but also are the initials of Percival Lowell, the American astronomer who initiated the search for a planet beyond Neptune that resulted in the discovery of Pluto. The Lowell Observatory in Arizona is named after him. In 1941, the newly created element plutonium was named after Pluto. The atomic number of plutonium is 94 in the periodic table of elements. Pluto is the only known dwarf planet with an atmosphere. It is very thin and would be toxic for humans to breathe. When Pluto is at its perihelion (closest to the sun), Pluto’s atmosphere is gas. When Pluto is at its aphelion (farthest from the sun), its atmosphere freezes and falls like snow. Many astronomers believe Pluto would be classified as a comet if it were closer to the sun. It takes Pluto 6 days, 9 hours, and 17 minutes to spin once. Venus has the slowest rotation, taking 243 days to spin just once. Jupiter is the fastest-spinning planet, rotating on average once in just less than 10 hours. Pluto takes the longer time than that of the eight planets (248 Earth years) to orbit around the sun. Because it’s the closest to the sun, Mercury has the fastest orbit, at 88 Earth days. Earth takes 365 days to orbit the sun. Pluto spins in the opposite direction as Earth, which means the sun rises in the west and sets in the east. Only Venus, Uranus, and Pluto have a retrograde rotation. It takes about five hours for sunlight to reach Pluto. It takes eight minutes to reach Earth. On Pluto, the sun rises and sets about once a week. The sky is so dark on Pluto that a person would be able to see stars during the day. Attempting to view Pluto from Earth is like trying to see a walnut from 30 miles away. Pluto rotates on its side, which means it has extreme seasonal variation. At its solstices, a quarter of its surface is in permanent daylight, while another quarter is in permanent darkness. Sunlight is almost 2,000 times dimmer on Pluto than it is on Earth, and the sun would be only a small point in the sky. The sun would be 1/30 as big and 1/900 as bright as it is on Earth, though it would still be much brighter than a full moon. When Pluto was considered a planet, it was the coldest of all the planets. Temperatures on Pluto can range from -240° to -218° C. The average temperature on Pluto is -229° C. A person who weighs 100 lbs. on Earth would weigh the least on Pluto than on any other planet, at 6.7 lbs. on Pluto.

Pluto has four known moons: Charon (ferryman of Hades), Nix (the Greek goddess of night and darkness), Hydra (the nine-headed serpent who guards Hades) and S/2011 P 1, which was discovered in 2011. Because Pluto’s moon Charon and Pluto orbit each other, Charon appears to stand still in Pluto’s sky. Additionally, the same sides of Pluto and Charon always face each other. Pluto’s moon Charon is almost the size of the planet itself, astronomers sometimes refer to the two as a double planet. Pluto’s moon Charon would look about seven times bigger than Earth’s moon, though it would be about the same brightness. Pluto’s distance from Earth varies. At its closest, Pluto is 4.2 billion kilometers (2.6 billion miles) away. At its farthest, Pluto is about 7.5 billion kilometers (4.7 billion miles) from Earth. It would take about 10 years for a spaceship to reach Pluto. The spacecraft New Horizons, which was launched in 2006, is scheduled to fly by Pluto in 2015. New Horizons was launched in Jan. 19, 2006; it swung past Jupiter for a gravity boost and scientific studies in February 2007, and conducted a six-month-long reconnaissance flyby study of Pluto and its moons in summer 2015, culminating with Pluto closest approach on July 14, 2015. Somewhere something incredible is waiting to be known. Humans must fly to the top of the atmosphere and beyond; only then humans will fully understand the universe. Although a certain amount of information was ascertained about the Pluto before the space age, this new era has revealed many secrets.

Moinee, A. Al. “Pluto: The Story of A Dwarf Planet” The Daily Sun. 6(6). 30 Oct. 2015. Morning Tea. 5(44).