Space I Pluto a former Rogue Planet

[Sailor.X]

With the discovery that Rogue Planets are the most numerous kind of Celestial Bodies in the Galaxy. I got to wondering. Pluto and Charon are the only two major bodies in the Solar System that have an orbit that crosses a Ice Giant. An orbit that is odd almost like they came from some place else. So what do you think. Is Pluto a former Rogue Planet?

 

[Jormungandr]

It's possible.

They think one of... I think it was Neptune's (?) moons is a rogue planet that was captured too, which is why it's so different compared to the others.

I think it was Triton?

 

[Flintsteel]

As far as I know, neither Pluto or Triton are thought to be captured exo-planets, just proto-Kuiper bent bodies.

The current Nice model has explications for multiple historical occurrences for solar system formation and history. Pluto/Charon is the largest, but just one of several objects that are in orbital residence with Nepture.

Since Pluto isn't the only body with this "odd" orbit, it doesn't seem that likely to be a captured rogue planet.

 

[Sailor.X]

As far as I know, neither Pluto or Triton are thought to be captured exo-planets, just proto-Kuiper bent bodies.

The current Nice model has explications for multiple historical occurrences for solar system formation and history. Pluto/Charon is the largest, but just one of several objects that are in orbital residence with Nepture.

Since Pluto isn't the only body with this "odd" orbit, it doesn't seem that likely to be a captured rogue planet.

That does not mean those other objects are not from outside the Solar System either. And do you have another source other than Wikipedia. Wiki is not really reliable for accurate information.

400 Earth-size rogue planets could be wandering the Milky Way

NASA's forthcoming Nancy Grace Roman Telescope will hunt for "cosmic orphans," starless planets that might even outnumber their orbiting counterparts in our galaxy.

www.space.com

 

[Bacle]

The likelihood of Pluto being a captured exo-planet is low, and there are others like it in similar orbits out past Neptune.

None of the main planets, and very few of the drawf planets, have any real possibility of being from outside the Oort Cloud, much less a rogue planet that was captured.

I expect that if any bodies in our solar system are captured rogues, we won't know it till we have multiple lander visits to a very large number of them.

 

[49ersfootball]

With the discovery that Rogue Planets are the most numerous kind of Celestial Bodies in the Galaxy. I got to wondering. Pluto and Charon are the only two major bodies in the Solar System that have an orbit that crosses a Ice Giant. An orbit that is odd almost like they came from some place else. So what do you think. Is Pluto a former Rogue Planet?

Now that sounds quite intriguing!

 

[Allanon]

Pluto to me is still a planet.

 

[Jormungandr]

Pluto to me is still a planet.

I can see both points of the debate.

On the one hand, Pluto was discovered and had been classed as a planet for centuries; on the other hand, while it is the largest of the bunch, Pluto is still just one of many TNOs out there, so it can't really be called a planet any more unless we find something that basically makes it unique to the other TNOs e.g. active geology?

People who lobbied for Pluto to remain an "honorary planet"? Yeah, I can get behind that.

 

[Sailor.X]

I can see both points of the debate.

On the one hand, Pluto was discovered and had been classed as a planet for centuries; on the other hand, while it is the largest of the bunch, Pluto is still just one of many TNOs out there, so it can't really be called a planet any more unless we find something that basically makes it unique to the other TNOs e.g. active geology?

People who lobbied for Pluto to remain an "honorary planet"? Yeah, I can get behind that.

Pluto and all the other objects should be called planets. Pluto has an atmosphere. It has tectonic activity. It has weather. They make Mercury a Planet when it is not even bigger than Titan and has no other objects in it's orbit only because it is so close to the sun. In my opinion if an object has an Atmosphere, Tectonic activity and has it's own orbit around the sun it should be called a planet.

 

[Jormungandr]

Pluto and all the other objects should be called planets. Pluto has an atmosphere. It has tectonic activity. It has weather. They make Mercury a Planet when it is not even bigger than Titan and has no other objects in it's orbit only because it is so close to the sun. In my opinion if an object has an Atmosphere, Tectonic activity and has it's own orbit around the sun it should be called a planet.

Yeah, in that case Pluto's pretty much a planet bar its size. You'd obviously have to exclude moons like Titan that have the same criteria, but that pretty much is a planet.

IIRC Sedna also has a similar thing going on like Pluto; Ceres doesn't, since while there is some chemical activity there, it's basically just a rounded, airless rock like Luna.

 

[Bacle]

Pluto and all the other objects should be called planets. Pluto has an atmosphere. It has tectonic activity. It has weather. They make Mercury a Planet when it is not even bigger than Titan and has no other objects in it's orbit only because it is so close to the sun. In my opinion if an object has an Atmosphere, Tectonic activity and has it's own orbit around the sun it should be called a planet.

Yeah, in that case Pluto's pretty much a planet bar its size. You'd obviously have to exclude moons like Titan that have the same criteria, but that pretty much is a planet.

IIRC Sedna also has a similar thing going on like Pluto; Ceres doesn't, since while there is some chemical activity there, it's basically just a rounded, airless rock like Luna.

Pluto is the King of the Dwarf Planets now because it has not cleared it's own orbit the way teh 8 main planets have, even if it fulfills all other planetary criteria.

The other option was making Ceres, Eris, and a few other recently found ice dwarves/TNO's into full planets, which is kinda weak tea, as was keeping them all as 'asteroids', which Ceres and Eris were classed as before the Dwarf Planet category was created.

I prefer Pluto as a planet, but I also understand the reasoning behind the dwarf planet category being created with Pluto as the first/King of them.

 

[Sailor.X]

Pluto is the King of the Dwarf Planets now because it has not cleared it's own orbit the way teh 8 main planets have, even if it fulfills all other planetary criteria.

The other option was making Ceres, Eris, and a few other recently found ice dwarves/TNO's into full planets, which is kinda weak tea, as was keeping them all as 'asteroids', which Ceres and Eris were classed as before the Dwarf Planet category was created.

I prefer Pluto as a planet, but I also understand the reasoning behind the dwarf planet category being created with Pluto as the first/King of them.

I saw the interview one of the scientists did. He literally said the only reason they even came up with Dwarf Planets is because the concept of there being tons of planets in our Solar System weirded them out. And no planet has fully cleared out its orbit. Because small bodies routinely enter the orbits of all the planets. Earth included.

Kirkwood gaps | Asteroids, Orbital Resonance, Jupiter

Kirkwood gaps, interruptions that appear in the distribution of asteroid semimajor axes where the orbital period of any small body present would be a simple fraction of that of Jupiter. Several zones of low density in the minor-planet population were noticed about 1860 by Daniel Kirkwood, an

www.britannica.com

 

[Bacle]

I saw the interview one of the scientists did. He literally said the only reason they even came up with Dwarf Planets is because the concept of there being tons of planets in our Solar System weirded them out. And no planet has fully cleared out its orbit. Because small bodies routinely enter the orbits of all the planets. Earth included.

Kirkwood gaps | Asteroids, Orbital Resonance, Jupiter

Kirkwood gaps, interruptions that appear in the distribution of asteroid semimajor axes where the orbital period of any small body present would be a simple fraction of that of Jupiter. Several zones of low density in the minor-planet population were noticed about 1860 by Daniel Kirkwood, an

www.britannica.com

What they mean by 'clear their orbit' isn't that nothing ever crosses it, it's that no other similar objects share a similar orbital path in the same general area.

Pluto has 'neighbors' who are similarly sized that are rather close by in astronomical terms, enough it is not in a truly 'cleared' orbital path around the sun like the main planets have.

To put in regular planet terms, it's like if Earth had a few other similarly sized planets, that followed a very similar orbit, both ahead and behind us in our orbital 'path', farther away than the moon, but closer to us than Mars or Venus.

 

[Sailor.X]

What they mean by 'clear their orbit' isn't that nothing ever crosses it, it's that no other similar objects share a similar orbital path in the same general area.

Pluto has 'neighbors' who are similarly sized that are rather close by in astronomical terms, enough it is not in a truly 'cleared' orbital path around the sun like the main planets have.

To put in regular planet terms, it's like if Earth had a few other similarly sized planets, that followed a very similar orbit, both ahead and behind us in our orbital 'path', farther away than the moon, but closer to us than Mars or Venus.

Given what is being seen in other Solar Systems in this Galaxy. That clearing the orbit of similar sized objects is not a given. They are finding weird Solar Systems around some stars.

 

[Bacle]

Given what is being seen in other Solar Systems in this Galaxy. That clearing the orbit of similar sized objects is not a given. They are finding weird Solar Systems around some stars.

You can get things like the Trojan asteroids that hang out at Lagrange points ahead of an behind a planet, but most of the time if they find similarly sized planets close to each other, they end up being binary planets or Roche worlds.

 

[Flintsteel]

On the one hand, Pluto was discovered and had been classed as a planet for centuries;

...Pluto was only verifiably observed (discovered) in 1930. It has not even been a single century.

In my opinion if an object has an Atmosphere, Tectonic activity and has it's own orbit around the sun it should be called a planet.

Stop Mars isn't a planet? As far as we know, basically all tectonic activity there has stopped.

 

[Jormungandr]

...Pluto was only verifiably observed (discovered) in 1930. It has not even been a single century.



Stop Mars isn't a planet? As far as we know, basically all tectonic activity there has stopped.

Yeah, I realized that later. I was thinking of the gas giants. One facepalm for me!

Anyway, Mars had past tectonic activity, despite its core basically being currently dead, and it has everything else including a very thin atmosphere, so I guess that if a planet had past or current tectonic activity and everything else, it's still a planet.

However, it's all a bit murky/confusing.

Ceres, as an example, has nothing like that; the only activity it has is chemical reactions that plum out into space on occasion. It's a dead, airless rock like Luna, so it wouldn't be a planet. However, Mercury is basically the same: It's also an airless, dead rock that's blasted constantly with radiation, yet it's still called a planet because it's by its lonesome and orbiting the Sun.

If we found Titan wandering around a stable orbit around the Sun, it'd meet the criteria of being a planet since it has (IIRC) tectonic activity, an atmosphere, and everything else needed to be classed as a planet... just like Pluto, which isn't classed as a planet. They also say Titan is what Earth looked like very early on its history too, incidentally.

Basically, the whole planet/dwarf planet thing needs to be redone because it's a fucked up mess that was basically hurriedly implemented because "having dozens of planets in our Solar System would be weird", to steal a quote from above.

 

[Sailor.X]

...Pluto was only verifiably observed (discovered) in 1930. It has not even been a single century.



Stop Mars isn't a planet? As far as we know, basically all tectonic activity there has stopped.

Mars is a planet. It has weather, And Atmosphere and two tiny moons.

 

[Allanon]

Will they exclude gas giants as planets, since I've heard that Jupiter could be a "near star?"

 

[Allanon]

Mars is a planet. It has weather, And Atmosphere and two tiny moons.

It also has John Carradine's head floating among the stars, lecturing about the Meaning of Life and Death.