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In National Parks NEWS VOL. 97 • NO. 19 • 1 OCT 2016 Global Risks from Coastal Subsidence Lessons from Dwarf Planets AGU Expands into Geohealth Snapshots of Research in National Parks NEWS What Have Dwarf Planets Taught Us About the Solar System? lassrooms across the world received Dwarf Planets Are as Complex as Regular some bad news on 24 August 2006. 1 Planets. When the New Horizons probe C Pluto—the celestial body discovered passed by Pluto more than a year ago, in 1930 and named by an 11-year-old​­ girl, the scientists found a complex system with areas “pizzas” in the planet mnemonic “My very of geologically young surface and evidence of educated mother just served us nine piz- active geology. Pluto, the images revealed, zas”—had been officially stricken from the wasn’t just a chunk of rock orbiting in space. solar system’s family of planets and reclassi- “Even I underestimated what we would find,” fied as a “dwarf planet.” said Alan Stern, principal investigator of the The discovery of the slightly more massive New Horizons mission. object Eris inspired the International Astro- Pluto continues to stun scientists with its nomical Union’s (IAU) decision. Proponents unexpected surface features, but its newly of the change insisted that if Pluto got to revealed complexity is just the beginning. keep the label “planet,” so too should simi- Makemake has no atmosphere. Haumea NASA/JHUAPL/SRI larly sized objects—​­like Ceres, for instance, spins faster than any other known large On 14 July 2015, NASA’s New Horizons probe snapped the which was then considered a large asteroid. object in the solar system. Eris might have a first ever close-up images of Pluto. Scientists continue to A dwarf planet, by IAU’s new definition, thin, icy surface. Ceres hosts mysterious be stunned by its unexpectedly complex surface fea- must directly orbit the Sun. It must be mas- bright spots. tures. sive enough for gravity to pull it into a “The fact that these objects can be every roughly spherical shape. But unlike regular bit as complicated as terrestrial planets is a planets, dwarf planets haven’t cleared other headline,” Stern said. “It should be written Scientists have always known about this smaller celestial debris out of their orbital in as big a point size as we can write it, resonance, but it was Malhotra who realized paths. because it was completely unexpected.” its significance. In a 1995 paper, Malhotra cal- As more objects got discovered, Pluto’s culated that the only way Neptune and Pluto new label “dwarf planet” stuck. Then the Dwarf Planets Reveal Neptune’s Orbital could have ended up in this resonance was if jokes began. 2 Origins. By studying the particular they both had formed closer to the Sun, then Facebook group pages popped up, with orbital relationship between Pluto and migrated outward (see http:// bit . ly/ snarky titles of “When I was your age, Pluto Neptune, scientists figured out how Neptune MalhotraPluto). was a planet!” Angry Pluto enthusiasts wrote got to its current position in the solar Scientists theorize that in the early days of hate mail to astronomer Mike “Pluto Killer” system. The two bodies are inextricably the solar system, the gas giants, Jupiter, Sat- Brown, one of the scientists who found Eris locked in an orbital resonance: Every time urn, Neptune, and Uranus, migrated inward (see http:// bit . ly/ PlutoKiller). Astrophysicist Neptune orbits the Sun three times, Pluto toward the Sun and knocked out leftover Neil deGrasse Tyson, a strong proponent of orbits twice, which means that even though debris. This gravitational push on planetary the dwarf planet label, received his own Pluto may occasionally cross Neptune’s debris ended up changing the planets’ orbits stream of hate mail from crushed 6-year- orbital path, they will never meet. as well, sending Neptune farther out. Nep- olds (see http:// bit . ly/ NDGTLetters). To this day, Twitter users occasionally hurl insults at both. Although some consider the reclassifica- tion a “demotion,” Pluto and its cousins Ceres, Makemake, Eris, Haumea, and others continue to dazzle scientists with their strange features and surprising geology. But perhaps more critical, these dwarf planets also trace a trail of scientific breadcrumbs that scientists can follow back in time to understand the origins of the solar system. “I like to think of Pluto being the dwarf planet that showed us how the solar system’s architecture came to be,” said Renu Malhotra, a planetary scientist at University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory. Here are six such revelations about the solar NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI system that we gained from studying dwarf A mosaic of Pluto’s complex surface taken by the New Horizons probe from about 15,000 kilometers away as it planets. approached Pluto on 14 July 2015. Scientists are working to understand the origins of these unexpectedly diverse features. Earth & Space Science News Eos.org // 9 NEWS Caltech/R. Hurt (IPAC) The orbits of Planet 9 and the dwarf planets it supposedly influences. Scientists calculated that only aNeptune- ​­sized planet could keep these objects in their peculiar, angled orbits. The diagram was created using the WorldWide Telescope. tune’s gravitational force encountered Pluto’s, For instance, all the Kuiper belt dwarf Vesta. There, scientists detected ammonia- and the two bodies pushed and pulled at each planets— Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and rich clays in Ceres’s surface. other until they fell into a resonance orbit. Eris—have moons that scientists suspect Ammonia itself isn’t stable at the tem- Astronomers detected the same effect in other formed from high- ​­impact collisions, said peratures found on Ceres (130–200 kelvins), bodies, including a new dwarf planet named Scott Sheppard, an astronomer at the but it is plentiful in the outer solar system. 2015 RR245 announced to the world this year Carnegie Institution for Science in So how did the molecule get there? Scien- (see http:// bit . ly/ new - dwarf - planet). Washington, D. C. Haumea in particular is tists have formulated different hypotheses, the only known Kuiper belt object to have a said Carol Raymond, deputy principal inves- Dwarf Planets Give Us a Peek into the “family” that orbits along with Haumea and tigator for Dawn. Either Ceres formed in the 3 Early Solar System. Dwarf planets are its moons, meaning that the debris kicked outer solar system, during its early days, and handy guides to the ancient solar system. off by an impact long ago didn’t have enough got kicked inward by a chaotic migration of energy to escape Haumea’s the gas giants, or Ceres formed in the aster- gravitational pull. oid belt, and somehow ammonia-​­rich mate- The presence of such moons rial from the outer solar system made its is further evidence of an early way inward. period of “late heavy bombard- Further study of Ceres will help clarify ment” of objects in the solar details of solar system formation, Raymond system. Scientists think that said. during this time, about 3.8–4 billion years ago, gravita- Dwarf Planet Candidates Helped tional interactions among Jupi- 4 Scientists “Find” Planet 9. Thanks to a ter, Saturn, and Neptune sent handful of debris orbiting farther away than comets and asteroids sprawling Pluto, scientists this year found evidence across the solar system to col- that a rocky, Neptune-​­sized planet may lurk lide with planets. beyond the gaze of even our most powerful NASA/JPL In the past 2 years, Ceres has telescopes (see http:// bit . ly/ Eos - Planet9). Scientists calculated that in the early solar system, Neptune migrated also provided various windows The story began in 2003, when Brown and out to its current position and nudged Pluto into a resonance orbit. into the past. In 2015, NASA’s his team at the California Institute of Tech- Although Pluto sometimes crosses Neptune’s orbital path, the reso- Dawn probe headed to the dwarf nology (Caltech) discovered Sedna, a dwarf nance prevents the two planets from colliding. planet after visiting the asteroid planet candidate that orbits far beyond the 10 // Eos 1 October 2016 NEWS Kuiper belt, Pluto’s neighborhood of large, icy bodies 30 astronomical units (AU) away. Sedna maintains a steady orbit and comes within only 76 AU of the Sun at its closest approach. Since then, scientists have spotted several more objects near Sedna, including 2012 VP113, found by Sheppard and colleague Chad Trujillo of Hawaii’s Gemini Observa- tory. The pair noticed that their new object and the rest of these far- away​­ objects had similar, steady orbits. Back at Caltech, after reading Sheppard’s and Trujillo’s work, Brown and his col- leagues set out to find the cause of such clustering, and after many hours of poring over models and simulations, they officially proposed that only a planet-​­sized body could exert enough gravitational pull to keep the far- away cluster of dwarf- planet- sized Hungarian Astronomical Association/Iván Éder, Observatory/András Pál, Konkoly NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI objects in steady orbits. This hypothesized There may be only six officially designated dwarf planets (missing from the image is 2015 RR245, announced this planet was deemed Planet 9 (sometimes year), but many more dwarf-planet-sized objects exist. They may even be the dominant class of objects in the solar system. called Planet X). “Right now we’re doing surveys trying to find more dwarf planets,” Sheppard said. “If remnants of a vast ocean that once existed peek below the icy shells of Jupiter’s and we find more and more of these, they can on the dwarf planet. Saturn’s moons Europa and Enceladus lead us to the much bigger, major Planet X.” Scientists figured out that mysterious bright because there are vast oceans underneath, patches in Ceres’s geologically young Occator and life needs water to proliferate.
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