PLUTO LOSES PLANET STATUS
Science books of primary school will now change forever. Our solar system has 9 nine
planets, that is what we all are accustomed to hearing right from primary school but now a historic decision has
changed it all.SO THE POPULAR QUOTE THAT :
MY VERY EDUCATED MOTHER JUST SHOWED US NINE PLANETS has changed forever. The meaning of the quote as well as the clues hidden under it also has to be changed forever. About 2,500 scientists meeting in Prague have adopted historic new guidelines that see the
small, distant world demoted to a secondary category. Pluto is now considered a
DWARF PLANET .Pluto's status has been contested for many years.
REASON: The researchers said Pluto failed to dominate its
orbit around the Sun in the same way as the other planets.It is also considered to be very small compared to the other 8 planets pf the solar system.Pluto is smaller even than some moons in the Solar System.Its orbit around the Sun is also highly tilted compared with the plane of the big planets. In addition, since the early 1990s, astronomers have found several objects of comparable size to Pluto in an outer region of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt. Some astronomers have long argued that Pluto would be better categorised alongside this population of small, icy worlds. The critical blow for Pluto came with the discovery three years ago of an object currently designated 2003 UB313. After being measured with the Hubble Space Telescope, it was shown to be some 3,000km (1,864 miles) in diameter: it is bigger than Pluto. 2003 UB313 will now join Pluto in the dwarf category, along with the biggest asteroid in the Solar System, Ceres.
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