Is Pluto a planet?

#Pluto #space #planet #solarsystem #asteroids #IAU

Pluto should be defined as a planet, along with over 100 celestial bodies in the solar system, including the moons of Jupiter and Earth, according to scientists who argue that the icy dwarf had been wrongly demoted.

Some years back, Pluto was demoted to the ‘non-planet’ status, which dropped the number of planets in our Solar System to 8. Pluto is an icy rock, and is nearly a fifth of diameter of the Earth., but due to the fact that Pluto does not move alone through its orbits (as there are some asteroids as well), excludes Pluto from the planet status as per the International Astronomical Union (IAU).

Including the fact that planets should move alone through their orbit, a planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion, has enough gravitational heft to maintain a roughly round shape, even if it bulges at the equator because of a three-way squeezes of forces created by its gravity and the influence of both the sun and a nearby larger planet.

However, researchers also believe that according to the IAU definition, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune will also be excluded from the Planet category since they share their orbits with asteroids.

Read the full article here.

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