What is Pluto?
Depending who you ask, Pluto is either Mickey Mouse’s pet dog, the Roman god of the Underworld or a planet.
Excuse me, I mean “dwarf planet.”
Or do I?
There seems to be a lot of debate as to what Pluto, once at the bottom of a list of nine planets we had to learn as children, is.
How do we define a planet?
Well, the International Astronomical Union has three points as to how they decided what is and isn’t a planet. These were applied to Pluto when it lost its status in 2006.
1. is in orbit around the Sun,
2. has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and
3. has “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit.
Pluto fits the first two definitions, but not the third. Pluto, being in the Kuiper Belt, shares its neighborhood with many, many other icy objects, including large dwarf planets like Eris and Makemake. It was also determined the dwarf planet was not in fact the largest gravitational force in its orbit; rather, it is swayed its gigantic neighbor, Neptune.
But wait!
According to Dr. Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida, in conjunction with its Florida Space…
