Pluto

Primary Contributor: Tobias Chant Owen

Pluto, large, distant member of the solar system that formerly was regarded as the outermost and smallest planet. It also was considered the most recently discovered planet, having been found in 1930. In August 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the organization charged by the scientific community with classifying astronomical objects, voted to remove Pluto from the list of planets and give it the new classification of dwarf planet. The change reflects astronomers’ realization that Pluto is a large member of the Kuiper belt, a collection of debris of ice and rock left over from the formation of the solar system and now revolving around the Sun beyond Neptune’s orbit. (For the IAU’s distinction between planet and dwarf planet and further discussion of the change in Pluto’s classification, see planet.)

Pluto is not visible in the night sky to the unaided eye. Its largest moon, Charon, is close enough in size to Pluto that it has become common to refer to the two bodies as a double system. Pluto is designated by the symbol ♇.

Pluto is named for the god of the underworld in Roman mythology (the Greek equivalent is Hades). It is so distant that the Sun’s light, which travels about 300,000 km (186,000 miles) per second, takes more than five hours to reach it. An observer standing on Pluto’s surface would see the Sun as an extremely bright star in the dark sky, providing Pluto on average 1/1,600 of the amount of sunlight that reaches Earth. Pluto’s surface temperature therefore is so cold that common gases such as nitrogen and carbon monoxide exist there as ices.

Basic data for Pluto
mean distance from Sun	5,910,000,000 km (39.5 AU)
eccentricity of orbit	0.251
inclination of orbit to ecliptic	17.1°
Plutonian year (sidereal period of revolution)	247.69 Earth years
visual magnitude at mean opposition	15.1
mean synodic period*	366.74 Earth days
mean orbital velocity	4.72 km/s
radius	1,172 km
mass	1.2 x 1022 kg
mean density	about 2 g/cm3
mean surface gravity	58 cm/s
escape velocity	1.1 km/s
rotation period (Plutonian sidereal day)	6.3873 Earth days (retrograde)
Plutonian mean solar day**	6.3874 Earth days
inclination of equator to orbit (obliquity)	120°
mean surface temperature	about 40 K (-387 °F, -233 °C)
surface pressure (near perihelion)	about 10-5 bar
number of known moons	3
*Time required for Pluto to return to the same position in the sky relative to the Sun as seen from Earth. **Smallness of deviation from sidereal day is due to Pluto’s huge orbit.

Because of Pluto’s remoteness and small size, the best telescopes on Earth and in Earth orbit have been able to resolve little detail on its surface. Indeed, such basic information as its radius and mass have been difficult to determine; most of what is known about Pluto has been learned since the late 1970s as an outcome of the discovery of Charon. Pluto has yet to be visited by spacecraft, though the U.S. spacecraft New Horizons departed Earth for the Pluto-Charon system in 2006 and will arrive there in July 2015; many key questions about it and its environs can be answered only by close-up robotic observations.

Basic astronomical data

Pluto’s mean distance from the Sun, about 5.9 billion km (3.7 billion miles or 39.5 astronomical units), gives it an orbit larger than that of the outermost planet, Neptune. (One astronomical unit [AU] is the average distance from Earth to the Sun about 150 million km [93 million miles].) Its orbit, compared with those of the planets, is atypical in several ways. It is more elongated, or eccentric, than any of the planetary orbits and more inclined (at 17.1°) to the ecliptic, the plane of Earth’s orbit, near which the orbits of most of the planets lie. In traveling its eccentric path around the Sun, Pluto varies in distance from 29.7 AU, at its closest point to the Sun (perihelion), to 49.5 AU, at its farthest point (aphelion). Because Neptune orbits in a nearly circular path at 30.1 AU, Pluto is for a small part of each revolution actually closer to the Sun than is Neptune. Nevertheless, the two bodies will never collide, because Pluto is locked in a stabilizing 3:2 resonance with Neptune i.e., it completes two orbits around the Sun in exactly the time it takes Neptune to complete three. This gravitational interaction affects their orbits such that they can never pass closer than about 17 AU. The last time Pluto reached perihelion occurred in 1989; for about 10 years before that time and again afterward, Neptune was more distant than Pluto from the Sun.

Observations from Earth have revealed that Pluto’s brightness varies with a period of 6.3873 Earth days, which is now well established as its rotation period (sidereal day). Of the planets, only Mercury, with a rotation period of almost 59 days, and Venus, with 243 days, turn more slowly. Pluto’s axis of rotation is tilted at an angle of 120° from the perpendicular to the plane of its orbit, so that its north pole actually points 30° below the plane. (By convention, above the plane is taken to mean in the direction of Earth’s and the Sun’s north poles; below, in the opposite direction. For comparison, Earth’s north polar axis is tilted 23.5° away from the perpendicular, above its orbital plane.) Pluto thus rotates nearly on its side in a retrograde direction (opposite the direction of rotation of the Sun and most of the planets); an observer on its surface would see the Sun rise in the west and set in the east.

Compared with the planets, Pluto is also anomalous in its physical characteristics. Pluto has a radius less than half that of Mercury; it is only about two-thirds the size of Earth’s Moon. Next to the outer planets the giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune it is strikingly tiny. When these characteristics are combined with what is known about its density and composition, Pluto appears to have more in common with the large icy moons of the outer planets than with any of the planets themselves. Its closest twin is Neptune’s moon Triton, which suggests a similar origin for these two bodies (see below Origin of Pluto and its moons). For additional orbital and physical data about Pluto, see the table.

The atmosphere

Although the detection of methane ice on Pluto’s surface in the 1970s (see below The surface and interior) gave scientists confidence that the body had an atmosphere, direct observation of it had to wait until the next decade. Discovery of its atmosphere was made in 1988 when Pluto passed in front of (occulted) a star as observed from Earth. The star’s light gradually dimmed just before it disappeared behind Pluto, demonstrating the presence of a thin, greatly distended atmosphere. Because Pluto’s atmosphere must consist of vapours in equilibrium with their ices, small changes in temperature should have a large effect on the amount of gas in the atmosphere. During the years surrounding Pluto’s perihelion in 1989, when Pluto was slightly less cold than average, more of its frozen gases vaporized; the atmosphere was then at or near its thickest, making it a favourable time to study the body. Astronomers in the year 2000 estimated a surface pressure in the range of a few to several tens of microbars (one microbar is one-millionth of sea-level pressure on Earth). At aphelion, when Pluto is receiving the least sunlight, its atmosphere may not be detectable at all.

Observations made during occultations cannot provide direct information about atmospheric composition, but they can allow determination of the ratio of mean molecular weight to temperature. Using reasonable assumptions about the atmospheric temperature, scientists have calculated that each particle i.e., each atom or molecule of Pluto’s atmosphere has a mean molecular weight of approximately 25 atomic mass units. This implies that significant amounts of gases heavier than methane, which has a molecular weight of 16, must also be present. Molecular nitrogen, with a molecular weight of 28, must in fact be the dominant constituent, because nitrogen ice was discovered on the surface (see below The surface and interior) and is known to be more volatile than methane ice. Nitrogen is also the main constituent of the atmospheres of both Triton and Saturn’s largest satellite, Titan, as well as of Earth.

Although ongoing Earth-based observations will add to knowledge about the atmosphere and other aspects of Pluto, major new insights will likely require a close-up visit from a spacecraft. Scientists looked to the U.S. New Horizons spacecraft mission, launched in 2006, to Pluto, Charon, and the outer solar system beyond to provide much of the needed data. The mission plan called for a nine-year flight to the Pluto-Charon system followed by a 150-day flyby for investigation of the surfaces, atmospheres, interiors, and space environment of the two bodies.

The surface and interior

Observations of Pluto show that its colour is slightly reddish, although much less red than Mars or Jupiter’s moon Io. Thus, the surface of Pluto cannot be composed simply of pure ices, a conclusion supported by the observed variation in brightness caused by its rotation. Its average reflectivity, or albedo, is 0.55 (i.e., it returns 55 percent of the light that strikes it), compared with 0.1 for the Moon and 0.8 for Triton.

The first crude infrared spectroscopic measurements (see spectroscopy), made in 1976, revealed the presence of solid methane on Pluto’s surface. Using new ground-based instrumentation available in the early 1990s, observers discovered ices of water, carbon monoxide, and molecular nitrogen. Although nitrogen’s spectral signature is intrinsically very weak, it is now clear that this substance must be the dominant surface constituent. The methane is present both as patches of pure methane ice and as a frozen “solution” of methane in the nitrogen ice. The nature of the dark, reddish material remains to be determined; some mixture of organic compounds produced by photochemical reactions in atmospheric gases or surface ices seems a likely possibility. Brightness fluctuations observed from 1954 to 1986 when Pluto and Charon mutually eclipsed one another (see below Pluto’s moons) revealed that Pluto’s south polar region was unusually bright. Scientists find such variation in Pluto’s surface striking because, with the exception of Saturn’s mysterious moon Iapetus, all the other icy bodies in the outer solar system exhibit much more uniform surfaces. A subsequent brightness map based on observations taken with the Earth-orbiting Hubble Space Telescope from 2002 to 2003 revealed seasonal changes as winter approached in the southern hemisphere. The north polar region became brighter, and the south polar region became darker.

The same Pluto-Charon eclipses have allowed astronomers to estimate the masses and radii of the two bodies. From this information their densities have been calculated to fall between 1.92 and 2.06 grams per cubic cm for Pluto and between 1.51 and 1.81 grams per cubic cm for Charon. These values suggest that both bodies are composed of a significant fraction of materials such as silicate rock and organic compounds denser than water ice (which has a density of 1 gram per cubic cm). It is customary to assume that Pluto, like the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn, has an inner rocky core surrounded by a thick mantle of water ice. The frozen nitrogen, carbon monoxide, and methane observed on its surface are expected to be in the form of a relatively thin layer, similar to the layer of water on Earth’s surface. Such a model, however, requires verification by spacecraft observations.

The surface temperature of Pluto has proved very difficult to measure. Observations made in 1983 from the Earth-orbiting Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) suggest values in the range of 45 to 58 K (−379 to −355 °F, −228 to −215 °C), whereas measurements from Earth’s surface at millimetre wavelengths imply a slightly lower range of 35 to 50 K (−397 to −370 °F, −238 to −223 °C). The temperature certainly must vary over the surface, depending on the reflectivity at a given location and the angle of the noon Sun there. The solar energy falling on Pluto is also expected to decrease by a factor of roughly three as it moves from perihelion to aphelion.

Pluto’s moons

Pluto possesses three known moons. Charon, by far the largest, is fully half the size of Pluto. It revolves around Pluto more accurately, the two bodies revolve around a common centre of mass at a distance of about 19,640 km (12,200 miles), equal to about eight Pluto diameters. (By contrast, Earth’s Moon is a little more than one-fourth the size of Earth and is separated from the latter by about 30 Earth diameters.) Charon’s period of revolution is exactly equal to the rotation period of Pluto itself; in other words, Charon is in synchronous orbit around Pluto. As a result, Charon is visible from only one hemisphere of Pluto. It remains above the same location on Pluto’s surface, never rising or setting (just as do communications satellites in geostationary orbits over Earth; see spaceflight: Earth orbit). In addition, as with most moons in the solar system, Charon is in a state of synchronous rotation i.e., it always presents the same face to Pluto.
Charon is somewhat less reflective (has a lower albedo about 0.35) than Pluto and is more neutral in colour. Its spectrum reveals the presence of water ice, which appears to be the dominant surface constituent. There is no hint of the solid methane that is so obvious on its larger neighbour. The observations to date were not capable of detecting ices of nitrogen or carbon monoxide, but, given the absence of methane, which is less volatile, they seem unlikely to be present. As discussed above in the section The surface and interior, Charon’s density implies that the moon contains materials such as silicates and organic compounds that are denser than water ice. The disposition of these materials inside Charon is even more speculative than it is for Pluto. For additional data about Charon, see the table.

Data for Pluto’s moon Charon
mean distance from centre of Pluto (orbital radius)	19,640 km
orbital period (sidereal period)	6.3873 Earth days
eccentricity of orbit	close to zero
rotation period	same as orbital period (synchronous)
inclination of orbit to Pluto’s equator	close to zero
radius	625 km
mass	1.8 x 1021 kg
mean density	about 1.7 g/cm3

Scientists have exploited the presence of Charon to reveal several characteristics of Pluto that would not otherwise be known, particularly its mass and size. Much of this information was acquired through the extraordinary coincidence that in 1985, just seven years after Charon’s discovery, it began a five-year period of mutual eclipse events with Pluto in which the moon alternately crossed the disk of (transited) and was hidden (was occulted, or was eclipsed) by Pluto, as seen from Earth, every 6.4 days. These events occur when Earth passes through Charon’s orbital plane around Pluto, which happens only twice during Pluto’s 248-year orbit around the Sun. Careful observations of these events allowed determinations of the radii of Pluto and Charon and of the masses of both bodies that were more precise than heretofore possible. In addition, monitoring the changes in the total brightness of the two bodies as they blocked each other permitted astronomers to estimate their individual overall albedos and even to create maps depicting brightness differences over their surfaces.
Pluto’s other two moons, called Hydra and Nix (provisionally designated S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2, respectively, on their discovery), are much smaller than Charon 72 and 88 km (45 and 55 miles) in diameter, respectively. They revolve around Pluto outside Charon’s path in nearly circular orbits (like Charon) and in the same orbital plane as Charon. The orbital radius of Hydra is about 65,210 km (40,520 miles); of Nix, 49,240 km (30,600 miles). It appears that for every 12 orbits completed by Charon, Hydra makes about 2 orbits (for a ratio of 6:1 in their orbital periods), while Nix makes nearly 3 orbits (for a 4:1 ratio); this also means that the orbital periods of Hydra and Nix are in a 3:2 ratio. These relationships of the orbital periods, which are approximately in the ratios of small whole numbers, suggest that the small moons are in stable dynamic resonances with Charon and with each other that is, all three bodies pass one another periodically, interacting via gravity in a way that tends to maintain the regularity of their encounters.

Discoveries of Pluto and its moons

When Pluto was found, it was considered the third planet to be discovered, after Uranus and Neptune, as opposed to the six planets that have been visible in the sky to the naked eye since ancient times. The existence of a ninth planet had been postulated beginning in the late 19th century on the basis of apparent perturbations of the orbital motion of Uranus, which suggested that a more-distant body was gravitationally disturbing it. Astronomers later realized that these perturbations were spurious the gravitational force from Pluto’s small mass is not strong enough to have been the source of the suspected disturbances. Thus, Pluto’s discovery was a remarkable coincidence attributable to careful observations rather than to accurate prediction of the existence of a hypothetical planet.

The search for the expected planet was supported most actively at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., U.S., in the early 20th century. It was initiated by the founder of the observatory, Percival Lowell, an American astronomer who had achieved notoriety through his highly publicized claims of canal sightings on Mars. After two unsuccessful attempts to find the planet prior to Lowell’s death in 1916, an astronomical camera built specifically for this purpose and capable of collecting light from a wide field of sky was put into service in 1929, and a young amateur astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, was hired to carry out the search. On Feb. 18, 1930, less than one year after he began his work, Tombaugh found Pluto in the constellation Gemini. The object appeared as a dim “star” of the 15th magnitude that slowly changed its position against the fixed background stars as it pursued its 248-year orbit around the Sun. Although Lowell and other astronomers had predicted that the unknown planet would be much larger and brighter than the object Tombaugh found, Pluto was quickly accepted as the expected ninth planet. The symbol invented for it, ♇, stands both for the first two letters of Pluto and for the initials of Percival Lowell.

Charon was discovered in 1978 on images of Pluto that had been recorded photographically at the U.S. Naval Observatory station in Flagstaff, fewer than 6 km (3.7 miles) from the site of Pluto’s discovery. These images were being recorded by James W. Christy and Robert S. Harrington in an attempt to obtain more-accurate measurements of Pluto’s orbit. The new satellite was named after the boatman in Greek mythology who ferries dead souls to Hades’ realm in the underworld.

Prior to the discovery of Charon, Pluto was thought to be larger and more massive than it actually is; there was no way to determine either quantity directly. Even in the discovery images, Charon appears as an unresolved bump on the side of Pluto, an indication of the observational difficulties posed by the relative nearness of the two bodies, their great distance from Earth, and the distorting effects of Earth’s atmosphere. Only near the end of the 20th century, with the availability of the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-based instruments equipped with adaptive optics that compensate for atmospheric turbulence, did astronomers first resolve Pluto and Charon into separate bodies.

A team of nine astronomers working in the United States discovered Pluto’s two small moons, Hydra and Nix, in 2005 in images made with the Hubble Space Telescope during a concerted search for objects traveling around Pluto as small as 25 km (16 miles) in diameter. To confirm the orbits, the astronomers checked Hubble images of Pluto and Charon made in 2002 for surface-mapping studies and found faint but definite indications of two objects moving along the orbital paths calculated from the 2005 images.

Origin of Pluto and its moons

Before the discovery of Charon, it was popular to assume that Pluto was a former moon of Neptune that had somehow escaped its orbit. This idea gained support from the apparent similarity of the dimensions of Pluto and Triton and the near coincidence in Triton’s orbital period (5.9 days) and Pluto’s rotation period (6.4 days). It was suggested that a close encounter between these two bodies when they were both moons led to the ejection of Pluto from the Neptunian system and caused Triton to assume the retrograde orbit that is presently observed.

Astronomers found it difficult to establish the likelihood that all these events would have occurred, and the discovery of Charon provided information that further refuted the theory. Because the revised mass of Pluto is only half that of Triton, Pluto clearly could not have caused the reversal of Triton’s orbit. Also, the fact that Pluto has a proportionally large moon of its own makes the escape idea implausible. Current thinking favours the idea that Pluto and Charon instead formed as two independent bodies in the solar nebula, the gaseous cloud from which the solar system condensed (see solar system: Origin of the solar system). A collision between Pluto and a proto-Charon could have produced a debris ring around Pluto that accreted by gravitational attraction to form the present moon. This scenario is similar to the currently favoured model for the formation of the Moon as a result of the collision of a Mars-sized body with Earth (see Moon: Origin and evolution). Just as the Moon appears to be deficient in volatile elements relative to Earth as a consequence of its high-temperature origin, so also can the absence of methane on Charon, along with the relatively high densities of both Pluto and Charon, be explained by a similar process.

Astronomers have argued that Pluto’s two small moons also are products of the same collision that resulted in the present Charon. The alternative scenario that they formed independently elsewhere in the outer solar system and were later gravitationally captured by the Pluto-Charon system does not appear likely given the combination of circular coplanar orbits and multiple dynamic resonances that currently exist for the two small bodies and Charon. Rather, these conditions suggest that material in the ring of debris that was ejected from the collision accreted into all three moons and possibly into others yet to be found.

This collision scenario implies that at the time the Pluto-Charon system formed, about 4.6 billion years ago, the outer solar nebula contained many icy bodies with the same approximate dimensions as these two. The bodies themselves are thought to have been built up from smaller entities that today would be recognized as the nuclei of comets. Triton is presumably another of these large icy planetesimals, captured into orbit by Neptune in the planet’s early history. Chiron, a small body orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus and believed to be a giant comet nucleus, and Phoebe, a moon of Saturn, represent somewhat smaller examples of such objects.

Most of these icy planetesimals were incorporated into the cores of the giant planets during their formation. Many others, however, are thought to have remained as the unconsolidated debris that makes up the Kuiper belt a thick disk-shaped region, flattened toward the plane of the solar system, that lies beyond Neptune’s orbit and, significantly, includes the outer part of Pluto’s orbit. Billions more icy objects were scattered to the outermost reaches of the solar system during the formation of Uranus and Neptune; they are believed to form the Oort cloud, a huge spherical shell surrounding the solar system at a distance of some 50,000 AU. After more than a thousand Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) were directly observed starting in the early 1990s, astronomers came to the conclusion that Pluto and Charon likely are large members of the Kuiper belt and that bodies such as Chiron, Neptune’s moon Triton, and a number of other icy moons of the outer planets originated as KBOs. In fact, like Pluto, there is one group of KBOs having highly eccentric orbits inclined to the plane of the solar system and exhibiting the same stabilizing 3:2 orbital resonance with Neptune. In recognition of this affinity, astronomers named this group of objects Plutinos (“little Plutos”).

Pluto’s status as a solar system member

Prior to the removal of Pluto from the official list of planets, astronomers had never established a rigorous scientific definition of a solar system planet, nor had they agreed on a minimum mass, radius, or mechanism of origin for a body to qualify as one. The traditional “instinctive” distinctions between the larger planetary bodies of the solar system, their moons, and small bodies such as asteroids and comets were made when their differences had seemed more profound and clear-cut and when the nature of the small bodies as remnant building blocks of the planets was dimly perceived. This early, disjointed conception of the solar system was in some ways analogous to the situation described by the Indian fable of the blind men, each of whom identified a different object after touching a different part of the same elephant. It later became clear that the original groupings of the components of the solar system required reclassification under a set of more-complex, interrelated definitions.

If Pluto had been discovered in the context of the Kuiper belt rather than as an isolated entity, it might never have been ranked with the eight planets. Indeed, in the decades after Pluto’s discovery, some astronomers continued to question its planetary status in view of its small size, icy composition, and anomalous orbital characteristics. Moreover, about the turn of the 21st century, astronomers observed several KBOs that are each roughly the size of Charon and one, named Eris, that is slightly larger than Pluto itself. Because Pluto was no longer unique in the outer reaches of the solar system, it became incumbent on astronomers either to admit additional members into the planetary ranks or to exclude Pluto. In 2006 the IAU voted to take the latter course while establishing the category of dwarf planets to recognize the larger, more-massive members of a given population of objects having similar compositions and origins and occupying the same orbital “neighbourhood.” Thus, Pluto, Eris, and Ceres Ceres, with a diameter of some 940 km (585 miles), is the largest object in the asteroid belt were designated dwarf planets. In June 2008 the IAU created a subcategory within the dwarf planet category, called plutoids, for all dwarf planets that are farther from the Sun than Neptune that is, bodies that are large KBOs. Pluto and Eris are plutoids; Ceres, because of its location in the asteroid belt, is not. Since then, two more KBOs, Makemake and Haumea, have been designated dwarf planets and plutoids.