Pluto is back, baby! Seventeen years after being demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet, it’s time for Pluto to reclaim its former title…at least according to hosts Chelsea White and Leah Crane.
In this episode of Dead Planets Society, Chelsea and Leah explore what it would take to officially make Pluto a planet, by changing the solar system rather than changing the rules set by the International Astronomical Union. Let’s get to the core. Joining them in their quest is Kathryn Volk with the University of Arizona Konstantin Batygin at the California Institute of Technology.
One of the requirements Pluto misses to officially become a planet is the ability to clear debris from its orbit. This small, distant world is not large enough to wipe out all the other rocks in its orbit. So what if it was bigger? Achieving this would require a large amount of mass, which would have an impact on super-sizing.
Perhaps it might be easier to simply drag Pluto into a better orbit, one that is already mostly empty. As long as its orbit is far enough from the sun that Pluto doesn’t evaporate. There is always the option of dropping a small black hole onto Pluto or shrinking the solar system around it. Achieving these things can be difficult, but our hosts are up to the challenge.
Dead Planets Society is a podcast with crazy ideas From snapping the moon in half to triggering a gravitational wave apocalypse, we expose how we tinker with the universe to see how it fares by exposing it to the laws of physics.
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