Pluto has had a rough time in recent years 🌌
Philip Metzger, a planetary scientist who led the research, scoured scientific literature over the last couple of hundred years and found only one publication that uses this same ‘clearing’ standard for classifying planets.‘The IAU definition would say that the fundamental object of planetary science, the planet, is supposed to be a defined on the basis of a concept that nobody uses in their research,’ Metzger said.
A mountain range on the edge of Pluto’s Sputnik Planitia ice plain – with dune formations clearly visible in the bottom half of the picture ‘We now have a list of well over 100 recent examples of planetary scientists using the wordin a way that violates the IAU definition, but they are doing it because it’s functionally useful,’ he said.‘It’s a sloppy definition,’ Metzger said of the IAU’s definition twelve years ago.
‘They didn’t say what they meant by clearing their orbit. If you take that literally, then there are no planets, because no planet clears its orbit.’ Study co-author Kirby Runyon, with Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, said the IAU’s definition was wrong since the literature review showed that clearing orbit is not a standard that is used for distinguishing asteroids from planets, as the IAU claimed when crafting the 2006 definition of planets.‘It is therefore fallacious to apply the same reasoning to Pluto.
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