Title: Pluto: The Problem Planet and its Scientists
Abstract: From its discovery at the Lowell Observatory in February 1930 to the present time, Pluto has always been a problem. First, was it discovered by chance? Or was it predicted? That problem took over 60 years to resolve. Most recently, a debate flared over its status as a planet. If it is a planet, what kind of planet? That question has just barely been resolved and is a valuable study in the complex process of consensus formation.1 In between, Pluto presented astronomers with many other problems, from explaining its lopsided orbit to determining its origin. Was it an escaped moon of Neptune, or did it form as a planetary body in the original solar nebula? Recounting these problems—why they were raised and how they were resolved—reveals not only critical stages in twentieth-century astronomy when our conception of the nature and extent of the solar system itself changed in profound ways, but a period of time when we learned that systems of planets themselves circling other stars are not rare occurrences due to chance, but are common in the universe arising through processes intrinsic to the formation of stars themselves. Pluto, we now realize, is the first inhabitant to be detected in a vast region of the solar system that, in its aggregate of countless thousands to millions of cold little bodies orbiting in a belt around the sun, are directly visible from interstellar distances.KeywordsSolar SystemKuiper BeltOort CloudPlanetary BodyMinor PlanetThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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