Pluto is a bit lonely. The dwarf planet is It is no longer considered a regular planet; does not orbit like the eight planets of the Solar System; and its orbit is highly elliptical and extremely inclined.
In fact, its orbit is much more similar to that of its neighbors in Kuiper’s belt, a Doughnut -shaped region beyond Neptune orbit that is also home to other dwarf planets such as Makemake and Eris, as well as millions of ice cream objects. But even compared to the rest of the objects in Kuiper’s belt, Pluto’s orbit is peculiar.
First, let’s compare Pluto with the Earth and other planets in the Solar System. The orbit of the dwarf planet has an eccentricity, how much deviates from a perfect circle, of 0.25. By way of comparison, the orbit of the Earth has an eccentricity of 0.0167, which means that it is almost circular. Saturn and Mars have eccentricities of 0.054 and 0.093, respectively.
Pluto’s orbit is inclined 17.4 degrees, compared to 1.5 degrees of the earth and the approximately 2 degrees of mercury.
Pluto’s unusual eccentricity and inclination is probably due to its interactions with neighbor Neptune and other giant planets, he said Renu MalhotraA planetary scientist at the University of Arizona who has widely studied Pluto’s orbit.
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Scientists believe that Neptune migration due to gravitational interactions with their giant neighbors plays a role in the explanation of Pluto’s orbit. At some point, the planets emigrated, and Pluto “was in this type of orbit because Neptune’s orbit had migrated outward … and swept Pluto in this resonance”, or when the severities of the orbits of the bodies are periodically influenced as they pass nearby, said Malhotra Live Science.
Let’s say it has a flat surface, said Malhotra. If you throw rock at random, they will end anywhere. But if you have immersions on the surface, the rocks will end up in those immersions. In the case of the planets, Neptune’s migration created a gravitational well for resonant objects such as Pluto.
Neptune keeps Pluto under control despite his strange orbit. For 20 years of orbit, 248, Pluto is within the orbit of Neptune. The two planets are in an orbital resonance 3: 2, which means that Pluto completes two orbits each time you have completed three.
“That configuration is very stable and protects Pluto from being pushed even more,” he said Will GrundyAn astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona and Co-investigator in NASA’s New Horizons Mission to Pluto.
There is another strange aspect of Pluto’s orbit. When the dwarf planet arrives in Perihelion, its closest point to the Sun, it is always above the planet plane. That is “really peculiar,” said Malhotra. In general, the planets and other dwarf planets are submerged above and below the plane over time, something that simulations suggest that Pluto has never done. This is caused by a dance between Pluto and the planets Jupiter and Uranus That works to prevent Pluto from throwing into chaos.
“We used to think that it was only the fact of Neptune and Pluto, but it turns out that the other planets are also very important in this other pluton feature,” said Malhotra.
However, Pluto is not just in having a strange orbit. For example, the Eris dwarf planet has an eccentricity of 0.45 and an inclination of approximately 43 degrees. “It’s a much more extreme orbit,” Grundy told Live Science.
There is still much to learn about how the planets emigrated and how much. And the Cosmic neighborhood of Pluto, Kuiper’s belt, will surely offer even more mysteries.
“There is more landscape in objects [100 kilometers, or about 60 miles, and bigger] In Kuiper’s belt that in the rest of the combined solar system on solid surfaces, “Grundy said.” It really is a mature area for exploration. “
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