Dwarf planets are all the smaller planets found within our solar system. There are about five of them, which we will detail and describe later. In the following article, we will learn everything about the different types of dwarf planets and much more.
What are the Dwarf Planets?
Dwarf planets are part of the solar system, although they do not receive much recognition in the field of astronomy. It is important to know what their characteristics are and what makes them so special.
When people are of school age, the first science lessons are about the solar system and the planets. They teach us how the universe goes beyond what the eyes can visualize day by day, and they make it possible for us to observe that, light years away, there are other forms of life that are similar to a greater or lesser extent than the of our planet.
However, space is made up of more than just planets. There are celestial bodies of different kinds, such as stars and dwarf planets. Stars are studied to varying degrees, but dwarf planets are not studied in the same way, as their study is mostly superficial.
What is the difference between a Dwarf Planet and a Normal Planet?
The Dwarf Planets, as its own term describes it, consist of planets that are smaller in size than the others that make up the solar system. Now many will wonder, how small are they? Without having to count such complicated numbers, these are located in an intermediate extreme between the planets that are "normal" in terms of size and the asteroids.
The aforementioned is a Basic Deduction and one of the most normal and common explanations that are made daily, and although it is partially true, it is not the criterion by which a planet is going to be cataloged as the so-called "Dwarf planet". Rather, the true criteria are as follows:
- It is located in a Orbit around the Sun. This means, if this planet revolves around this great central star.
- Its mass is enough for its gravitational force to exceed that of a rigid body. In a nutshell: This planet has a spherical or nearly spherical shape.
- It is not a satellite of a planet. That is, it does not revolve around another star other than the Sun itself.
- The fourth category is that the planet itself cannot cleanse the vicinity of its own orbit. When a space object manages to reach a specific level of development, it will come to predominate in an exact way in what all the stars are, either by dragging them, moving them away or even making them revolve around it.
This is not usually the case for dwarf planets, which means that there are other types of independent stars in which they are around their own orbit. Of these 4 criteria, the only one that can differentiate a dwarf planet from other planets is the last one. Since the "normal" planets have sufficient capacity to clean their orbital neighborhoods, while in the case of dwarf planets it is not.
What are the Dwarf Planets of the Solar System?
In total there are about 5 dwarf planets that are in our solar system. The names of these are:
- Ceres
- Pluto
- Eris
- makemake
- haumea
Now we are going to detail what their main characteristics are individually:
Ceres
This dwarf planet was discovered in 1801 by a man named Giuseppe Piazzi. It is located between the orbits of the Planet Mars and the Planet Jupiter. It was considered as a comet at first, also as a planet, and finally as one of the dwarf planets.
The mass of this is a third of the total of the so-called Asteroid Belt. It has a diameter of about 950 x 932 kilometers, more or less the distance between Gibraltar and Gijón, which would be to cross Spain vertically. It consists of a planet with a large amount of water inside, which is a finding that was made by the European Space Agency in the course of 2014.
Pluto
The planet Pluto was discovered in 1930 by a man named Clyde William Tombaugh. It is a type of dwarf planet located very close to the orbit of Neptune. For many years, it was considered one of the planets of the Solar System; however, after the General Assembly in Prague in 2006, it was categorized as a dwarf planet.
The Planet Pluto has a diameter of about 2.370 km, just over a sixth of the diameter of the Earth. In the same way as in the case of Ceres, it has a surface of frozen water and an atmospheric layer that is completely blue.
Eris
Along with the planet Makemake, it is one of the dwarf planets that has been discovered recently. The diameter of this is usually slightly less than that of the Planet Pluto, with about 2.326 km. This belongs to the group called "Plutoid", so its orbit is beyond the Planet Neptune. In addition, this dwarf planet belongs to the so-called "Kuiper Belt", which consists of a set of cometary bodies that orbit the Sun at a distance of between 30 and 100 AU.
makemake
This dwarf planet was discovered in 2005 and is another classified as a "Plutoid", apart from being one of the largest objects in the Kuiper Belt. The diameter of this planet reaches more or less about 1.420 km, a little more than half of Planet Pluto.
haumea
Like the other three mentioned above, this one is also considered a plutoid, and is located in the Kuiper Belt, just beyond the planet Neptune; for this reason, it is considered a plutoid. This dwarf planet was discovered in 3 by a man named Jose Luiz Ortiz Moreno at the Sierra Nevada Observatory, located in the Spanish region. Its radius is approximately 2003 to 1.300 km, making it a planet with a kind of elliptical shape.
Aside from these five dwarf planets, there is a small group of planets known as "potential planets." These have not yet been categorized as dwarf planets, but are currently under observation for future inclusion in the coming years. It has been estimated that there are around 5 dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt, on the outskirts of the Solar System, and approximately 200 within a much more distant region.
Why was Pluto considered a Dwarf Planet?
The reclassification that Pluto underwent in the course of 2006 was not exempt from great controversy. The main reason with which they argued that the decision was made to place it as a Dwarf Planet was that it did not meet the fourth requirement of a Normal Planet, which was:
“It has not been able to clear the neighborhoods of its orbit. When a star manages to reach a specific level of evolution, it comes to influence incisively what are the stars that besiege it, either by attracting them, moving them away or even making them revolve around it.
For what a large number of scientists disagreed at that time and to this day, the debate continues to be open, especially after the great discoveries made by the New Horizons probe, which has been able to demonstrate that the Planet Pluto has some 5 satellites and with its own atmosphere, so it does have the great capacity necessary to influence the path of the surrounding stars.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNo_hOVgp7s