Dwarf Planets: Kyle Wolff: 5/23/13

The official term of a dwarf planet, a celestial body resembling a small planet but lacking certain technical criteria that are required for it to be classed as such. Dwarf planets are usually smaller than normal planets. Dwarf planets are pretty much bid bodies of rock that can resemble a planet, but doesn’t fit in all of the criteria to be a planet. Dwarf planets usually lack of one qualification or “technical criteria” to be a planet. A dwarf planet is mainly a big piece of rock, that scientists and astronomers had decided that it wasn’t good enough to be a planet. Another way to define a dwarf planet is that they have enough mass to pull together its planet into a spherical shape, is not a moon for another major planet, and it has not cleared the space around it.

Dwarf planets are mainly located in the Kuiper belt. The kuiper belt is much like the asteroid belt in many ways, but they consist of different things. The Kuiper belt mainly consists of icy chunks of different substances. The kuiper belt is located outside neptune, while the asteroid belt is located between mars and jupiter. The Kuiper belt has dwarf planets and KBOs which are much like comets. There are 5 known dwarf planets in the kuiper belt. Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea.

Pluto used to be a planet but has now been reclassified as a dwarf planet. We don’t know a lot about Pluto but NASA has launched a mission called New Horizon thats due to arrive in 2015. It’s set to give us information on pluto and the kuiper belt. Pluto has an estimated diameter of only 2/3’s as wide as our moon. Pluto has certain surface conditions that scientists think might consist of a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of water ice, with more exotic ices surrounding it, possible methane or nitrogen frost coating the surface. Pluto orbital period has a length of 248 earth years, with 20 years that it is closer to the sun than neptune. Pluto is around 3,670,050,000 miles from the sun. Pluto also has lots of extremely large suns, one half it’s size called Charon. Pluto is the only dwarf planet that used to be a major planet.

Ceres is the only dwarf planet in the asteroid belt. Ceres consists of almost 25% of the asteroid belts total mass yet pluto is 14 times as big as Ceres. Ceres diameter is about the size of texas! Unlike the asteroids in the asteroid belt, ceres has evidence that it might have large amounts of pure water ice beneath its surface. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope shows us that ceres shares lots of characteristics of the terrestrial planets of our inner solar system. Ceres also has the characteristic of having denser materials in its core and less dense materials on it’s surface.

Eris is the largest dwarf planet known to us. It’s larger than pluto, and is also in the kuiper belt. Eris is the farther object known to us that orbits around the sun.  Eris is almost 10 billion miles from the sun or 107 times farther away than earth! It’s much farther than pluto, around 3 times as far. It takes twice as long to orbit the sun than pluto so almost 500 years to orbit the sun. The temperature of Eris is a nice 405 degrees below 0. The structure or layers of Eris is much like pluto. Scientist think that it also has a rock/ice inner core, and has a size of around 2400 km. People are even calling Eris the doppelganger of Pluto! (In case you didn’t know a doppelganger is an exact copy of another thing)

We don’t know much about the dwarf planet Makemake but scientists have already determined it doesn’t have an atmosphere. They think that makemake is a sphere that is flattened slightly at both poles and mainly covered in white ices, mostly methane ice. No one knows why makemake doesn’t have an atmosphere, but some scientists think that it’s because it has a lack of nitrogen ice. For pluto, when the sun heats up it’s nitrogen ice, it turns into gas. (or it turns into pluto’s atmosphere) Because makemake has nothing for the sun to heat up, it has no atmosphere.

Haumea is one of the strangest dwarf planets in our solar system. It has around the same diameter as pluto, it is shaped like a football. Haumea spins end over end around every 4 hours a lot like when a kicker tries to make a field goal. We think it’s almost entirely made of rock, but it also has a glaze of ice or frost on its surface. Everything that scientists know about the shape of the planet is that in its past another object slammed into it at a very high speed and broke apart the planet.