Chapter 12 Rings, Moons, and Pluto
12.3 Pluto and Charon – Should Pluto still be called a planet?
Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, you will be able to:
- Compare the orbital characteristics of Pluto with those of the planets
- State the official IAU definition of a planet
- Describe information about Pluto’s surface deduced from the New Horizons images
- Note some distinguishing characteristics of Pluto’s large moon Charon
Pluto is not a moon, but we discuss it here because its size and composition are similar to many moons in the outer solar system. Our understanding of Pluto (and its large moon Charon) have changed dramatically as a result of the New Horizons flyby in 2015.
Is Pluto a Planet?
Pluto was discovered through a careful, systematic search, unlike Neptune, whose position was calculated from gravitational theory. Nevertheless, the history of the search for Pluto began with indications that Uranus had slight departures from its predicted orbit, departures that could be due to the gravitation of an undiscovered “Planet X.” Early in the twentieth century, several astronomers, most notably Percival Lowell, then at the peak of his fame as an advocate of intelligent life on Mars, became interested in searching for this ninth planet.
Lowell and his contemporaries based their calculations primarily on tiny unexplained irregularities in the motion of Uranus. Lowell’s computations indicated two possible locations for a perturbing Planet X; the more likely of the two was in the constellation Gemini. He predicted a mass for the planet intermediate between the masses of Earth and Neptune (his calculations gave about 6 Earth masses). Other astronomers, however, obtained other solutions from the tiny orbital irregularities, even including one model that indicated two planets beyond Neptune.
At his Arizona observatory, Lowell searched without success for the unknown planet from 1906 until his death in 1916, and the search was not renewed until 1929. In February 1930, a young observing assistant named Clyde Tombaugh (see the Clyde Tombaugh: From the Farm to Fame feature box), comparing photographs he made on January 23 and 29 of that year, found a faint object whose motion appeared to be about right for a planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune. The new planet was named for Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, who dwelt in remote darkness, just like the new planet. The choice of this name, among hundreds suggested, was helped by the fact that the first two letters were Percival Lowell’s initials.
Although the discovery of Pluto appeared initially to be a vindication of gravitational theory similar to the earlier triumph of Adams and Le Verrier in predicting the position of Neptune, we now know that Lowell’s calculations were wrong. When its mass and size were finally measured, it was found that Pluto could not possibly have exerted any measurable pull on either Uranus or Neptune. Astronomers are now convinced that the reported small anomalies in the motions of Uranus are not, and never were, real.
From the time of its discovery, it was clear that Pluto was not a giant like the other four outer solar system planets. For a long time, it was thought that the mass of Pluto was similar to that of Earth, so that it was classed as a fifth terrestrial planet, somehow misplaced in the far outer reaches of the solar system. There were other anomalies, however, as Pluto’s orbit was more eccentric and inclined to the plane of our solar system than that of any other planet. Only after the discovery of its moon Charon in 1978 could the mass of Pluto be measured, and it turned out to be far less than the mass of Earth.
In addition to Charon, Pluto has four small moons. Subsequent observations of Charon showed that this moon is in a retrograde orbit and has a diameter of about 1200 kilometres, more than half the size of Pluto itself. This makes Charon the moon whose size is the largest fraction of its parent planet. We could even think of Pluto and Charon as a double world. Seen from Pluto, Charon would be as large as eight full moons on Earth.
To many astronomers, Pluto seemed like the odd cousin that everyone hopes will not show up at the next family reunion. Neither its path around the Sun nor its size resembles either the giant planets or the terrestrial planets. In the 1990s, astronomers began to discover additional small objects in the far outer solar system, showing that Pluto was not unique. We will discuss these trans-neptunian objects later with other small bodies. One of them (called Eris) is nearly the same size as Pluto, and another (Makemake) is substantially smaller. It became clear to astronomers that Pluto was so different from the other planets that it needed a new classification. Therefore, it was called a dwarf planet, meaning a planet much smaller than the terrestrial planets. We now know of many small objects in the vicinity of Pluto and we have classified several as dwarf planets.
IAU International Astronomical Union definition of a Planet
The final resolution
The first draft proposal for the definition of a planet was debated vigorously by astronomers at the 2006 IAU General Assembly in Prague and a new version slowly took shape. This new version was more acceptable to the majority and was put to the members of the IAU for a vote at the Closing Ceremony on the 24 August 2006. By the end of the Prague General Assembly, its members voted that the resolution B5 on the definition of a planet in the Solar System would be as follows:
A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
To read more about this hotly debated resolution, you can go to https://www.iau.org/public/themes/pluto/ .
Most scientists see this re-classification as an excellent example of science in action. As we learn more about the universe, we reexamine and reclassify what we knew before. Mike Brown is the scientist most associated with the decision to reclassify Pluto as a dwarf planet. He wrote a best selling book called “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming”. His Twitter handle is “PlutoKiller”. You can read a review of this excellent book here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/thoughtful-animal/book-review-how-i-killed-pluto-by-mike-brown/ and listen to him talk about this process by watching the video here:
Dwarf planets
Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto when he was 24 years old, and his position as staff assistant at the Lowell Observatory was his first paying job. Tombaugh had been born on a farm in Illinois, but when he was 16, his family moved to Kansas. There, with his uncle’s encouragement, he observed the sky through a telescope the family had ordered from the Sears catalog. Tombaugh later constructed a larger telescope on his own and devoted his nights (when he wasn’t too tired from farm work) to making detailed sketches of the planets. Images of Tombaugh may be found in Figure 3.
In 1928, after a hailstorm ruined the crop, Tombaugh decided he needed a job to help support his family. Although he had only a high school education, he thought of becoming a telescope builder. He sent his planet sketches to the Lowell Observatory, seeking advice about whether such a career choice was realistic. By a wonderful twist of fate, his query arrived just when the Lowell astronomers realized that a renewed search for a ninth planet would require a very patient and dedicated observer.
The large photographic plates (pieces of glass with photographic emulsion on them) that Tombaugh was hired to take at night and search during the day contained an average of about 160,000 star images each. How to find Pluto among them? The technique involved taking two photographs about a week apart. During that week, a planet would move a tiny bit, while the stars remained in the same place relative to each other. A new instrument called a “blink comparator” could quickly alternate the two images in an eyepiece. The stars, being in the same position on the two plates, would not appear to change as the two images were “blinked.” But a moving object would appear to wiggle back and forth as the plates were alternated.
After examining more than 2 million stars (and many false alarms), Tombaugh found his planet on February 18, 1930. The astronomers at the observatory checked his results carefully, and the find was announced on March 13, the 149th anniversary of the discovery of Uranus. Congratulations and requests for interviews poured in from around the world. Visitors descended on the observatory in scores, wanting to see the place where the first new planet in almost a century had been discovered, as well as the person who had discovered it.
In 1932, Tombaugh took leave from Lowell, where he had continued to search and blink, to get a college degree. Eventually, he received a master’s degree in astronomy and taught navigation for the Navy during World War II. In 1955, after working to develop a rocket-tracking telescope, he became a professor at New Mexico State University, where he helped found the astronomy department. He died in 1997; some of his ashes were placed inside the New Horizons spacecraft to Pluto.
Using data from the New Horizons probe, astronomers have measured the diameter of Pluto as 2370 kilometres, only 60 percent as large as our Moon. From the diameter and mass, we find a density of 1.9 g/cm3, suggesting that Pluto is a mixture of rocky materials and water ice in about the same proportions as many outer-planet moons.
Parts of Pluto’s surface are highly reflective, and its spectrum demonstrates the presence on its surface of frozen methane, carbon monoxide, and nitrogen. The maximum surface temperature ranges from about 50 K when Pluto is farthest from the Sun to 60 K when it is closest. Even this small difference is enough to cause a partial sublimation (going from solid to gas) of the methane and nitrogen ice. This generates an atmosphere when Pluto is close to the Sun, and it freezes out when Pluto is farther away. Observations of distant stars seen through this thin atmosphere indicate that the surface pressure is about a ten-thousandth of Earth’s. Because Pluto is a few degrees warmer than Triton, its atmospheric pressure is about ten times greater. This atmosphere contains several distinct haze layers, presumably caused by photochemical reactions, like those in Titan’s atmosphere.
Reaching Pluto with a spacecraft was a major challenge, especially in an era when reduced NASA budgets could not support large, expensive missions like Galileo and Cassini. Yet like Galileo and Cassini, a Pluto mission would require a nuclear electric system that used the heat from plutonium to generate the energy to power the instruments and keep them operating far from the warmth of the Sun. NASA made available one of the last of its nuclear generators for such a mission. Assuming an affordable but highly capable spacecraft could be built, there was still the problem of getting to Pluto, nearly 5 billion kilometres from Earth, without waiting decades. The answer was to use Jupiter’s gravity to slingshot the spacecraft toward Pluto.
The 2006 launch of New Horizons started the mission with a high speed, and the Jupiter flyby just a year later gave it the required additional boost. The New Horizons spacecraft arrived at Pluto in July 2015, traveling at a relative speed of 14 kilometres per second (or about 50,000 kilometers per hour). With this high speed, the entire flyby sequence was compressed into just one day. Most of the data recorded near closest approach could not be transmitted to Earth until many months later, but when it finally arrived, astronomers were rewarded with a treasure trove of images and data.
First Close-up Views of Pluto
Pluto is not the geologically dead world that many anticipated for such a small object—far from it. The division of the surface into areas with different composition and surface texture is apparent in the global colour photo shown in Figure 5. The reddish colour is enhanced in this image to bring out differences in colour more clearly. The darker parts of the surface appear to be cratered, but adjacent to them is a nearly featureless light area in the lower right quadrant of this image. The dark areas show the colours of photochemical haze or smog similar to that in the atmosphere of Titan. The dark material that is staining these old surfaces could come from Pluto’s atmospheric haze or from chemical reactions taking place at the surface due to the action of sunlight.
The light areas in the photo are lowland basins. These are apparently seas of frozen nitrogen, perhaps many kilometres deep. Both nitrogen and methane gas are able to escape from Pluto when it is in the part of its orbit close to the Sun, but only very slowly, so there is no reason that a vast bowl of frozen nitrogen could not persist for a long time.
The image above and below shows some of the remarkable variety of surface features New Horizons revealed. At the right of this image we see the “shoreline” of the vast bowl of nitrogen ice we saw as the smooth region. Temporarily nicknamed the “Sputnik Plains,” after the first human object to get into space, this round region is roughly a thousand kilometres wide and shows intriguing cells or polygons that have an average width of more than 30 kilometres. The mountains in the middle are great blocks of frozen water ice, some reaching heights of 2 to 3 kilometres.
The image below shows another view of the boundary between different types of geology. The width of this image is 250 kilometres, and it shows dark, ancient, heavily cratered terrain; dark, uncratered terrain with a hilly surface; smooth, geologically young terrain; and a small cluster of mountains more than 3000 meters high. In the best images, the light areas of nitrogen ice seem to have flowed much like glaciers on Earth, covering some of the older terrain underneath them.
The isolated mountains in the midst of the smooth nitrogen plains are probably also made of water ice, which is very hard at the temperatures on Pluto and can float on frozen nitrogen. Additional mountains, and some hilly terrain that reminded the mission scientists of snakeskin, are visible in part (b). These are preliminary interpretations from just the first data coming back from New Horizons in 2015 and early 2016. As time goes on, scientists will have a better understanding of the unique geology of Pluto.
A Quick Look at Charon
To add to the mysteries of Pluto, we see in the image below one of the best New Horizons images of Pluto’s large moon Charon. Recall from earlier that Charon is roughly half Pluto’s size (its diameter is about the size of Texas). Charon keeps the same side toward Pluto, just as our Moon keeps the same side toward Earth. What is unique about the Pluto-Charon system, however, is that Pluto also keeps its same face toward Charon. Like two dancers embracing, these two constantly face each other as they spin across the celestial dance floor. Astronomers call this a double tidal lock.
What New Horizons showed was another complex world. There are scattered craters in the lower part of the image, but much of the rest of the surface appears smooth. Crossing the centre of the image is a belt of rough terrain, including what appear to be tectonic valleys, as if some forces had tried to split Charon apart. Topping off this strange image is a distinctly red polar cap, of unknown composition. Many features on Charon are not yet understood, including what appears to be a mountain in the midst of a low-elevation region.
Key Concepts and Summary
Pluto and Charon have been revealed by the New Horizons spacecraft to be two of the most fascinating objects in the outer solar system. Pluto is small (a dwarf planet) but also surprisingly active, with contrasting areas of dark cratered terrain, light-coloured basins of nitrogen ice, and mountains of frozen water that may be floating in the nitrogen ice. Even Pluto’s largest moon Charon shows evidence of geological activity. Both Pluto and Charon turn out to be far more dynamic and interesting than could have been imagined before the New Horizons mission.