12.4 Pluto and charon

Learning objectives

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Compare the orbital characteristics of Pluto with those of the planets
• Describe information about Pluto’s surface deduced from the New Horizons images
• Note some distinguishing characteristics of Pluto’s large moon Charon

Pluto is not a moon, but we discuss it here because its size and composition are similar to many moons in the outer solar system. Our understanding of Pluto (and its large moon Charon ) have changed dramatically as a result of the New Horizons flyby in 2015.

Is pluto a planet?

Pluto was discovered through a careful, systematic search, unlike Neptune , whose position was calculated from gravitational theory. Nevertheless, the history of the search for Pluto began with indications that Uranus had slight departures from its predicted orbit, departures that could be due to the gravitation of an undiscovered “Planet X.” Early in the twentieth century, several astronomers, most notably Percival Lowell , then at the peak of his fame as an advocate of intelligent life on Mars, became interested in searching for this ninth planet.

Lowell and his contemporaries based their calculations primarily on tiny unexplained irregularities in the motion of Uranus. Lowell’s computations indicated two possible locations for a perturbing Planet X; the more likely of the two was in the constellation Gemini. He predicted a mass for the planet intermediate between the masses of Earth and Neptune (his calculations gave about 6 Earth masses). Other astronomers, however, obtained other solutions from the tiny orbital irregularities, even including one model that indicated two planets beyond Neptune.

At his Arizona observatory, Lowell searched without success for the unknown planet from 1906 until his death in 1916, and the search was not renewed until 1929. In February 1930, a young observing assistant named Clyde Tombaugh (see the Clyde Tombaugh: From the Farm to Fame feature box), comparing photographs he made on January 23 and 29 of that year, found a faint object whose motion appeared to be about right for a planet far beyond the orbit of Neptune ( [link] ). The new planet was named for Pluto, the Roman god of the underworld, who dwelt in remote darkness, just like the new planet. The choice of this name, among hundreds suggested, was helped by the fact that the first two letters were Percival Lowell’s initials.

Pluto’s motion.

Although the discovery of Pluto appeared initially to be a vindication of gravitational theory similar to the earlier triumph of Adams and Le Verrier in predicting the position of Neptune, we now know that Lowell’s calculations were wrong. When its mass and size were finally measured, it was found that Pluto could not possibly have exerted any measurable pull on either Uranus or Neptune. Astronomers are now convinced that the reported small anomalies in the motions of Uranus are not, and never were, real.