Pluto has been making a lot of new is recent years. In a 2006 Astronomical Union ruling, it was decided the planet was actually a “dwarf planet”. Now, the latest intriguing news about the planet is that Pluto appears to be changing color.
Pluto is appearing redder than it has in decades in the most recent photos of the planet. While the color is still considered yellow-orange, scientists are saying that the red pigment of the planet’s color has increased by about 20 percent. This has never happened before to the planet, and it is leaving scientists mystified because a single season can last up to 120 years in some areas. There is no concrete explanation for the sudden and dramatic change.
Because it takes 248 years for the planet to revolve around the sun, it’s hard to know what is truly happening. The current theory of what is happening is that the hydrogen atoms are being stripped from Pluto’s methane by solar winds. This is leaving carbon-rich areas on the planet that look redder than before.
The New Horizons spacecraft from NASA is at the halfway point on its journey to Pluto. It is scheduled to arrive in 2015.
Please do not blindly accept the controversial demotion of Pluto, which was done by only four percent of the International Astronomical Union, most of whom are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately opposed in a formal petition by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Stern and like-minded scientists favor a broader planet definition that includes any non-self-luminous spheroidal body in orbit around a star. The spherical part is important because objects become spherical when they attain a state known as hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning they are large enough for their own gravity to pull them into a round shape. This is a characteristic of planets and not of shapeless asteroids and Kuiper Belt Objects. Pluto meets this criterion and is therefore a planet. At the very least, you should note that there is an ongoing debate rather than portraying one side as fact when it is only one interpretation of fact.