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Chapter 12: Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies

Chapter 12: Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies. Pluto: distant ice world that was once a planet. Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930.

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Chapter 12: Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies

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  1. Chapter 12:Dwarf Planets and Small Solar System Bodies

  2. Pluto: distant ice world that was once a planet

  3. Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 Percival Lowell made calculations on the orbit of Neptune and predicted a 9th planet. His calculations were based on flawed data, there is no 9th planet.

  4. Pluto’s moon Charon was discovered by James Christy in 1978

  5. Pluto and Charon are tidally locked on each other Just as we only see one side of our moon from Earth, Pluto only sees one side of Charon. Since Pluto is also tidally locked, Charon also only sees one side of Pluto.

  6. Four more moons have been discovered around Pluto

  7. Pluto, Charon, Nix and Hydra are not very large

  8. Pluto Has An Atmosphere!

  9. The New Horizons mission is on its way to Pluto. It will fly by in 2015

  10. Eris is the reason Pluto isn’t a planet anymore

  11. There are a number of “large” Kuiper Belt Objects

  12. There are now 5 Dwarf Planets

  13. Ceres has been promoted from asteroid to dwarf planet Ceres was called a planet when it was discovered in 1801 but it was later demoted when we started to find lots of other objects in the asteroid belt

  14. The Debris of the Solar System Asteroids and comets are leftover planetesimals. We don’t see the icy planetesimals until the fall in to the inner part of the system solar

  15. When a piece of an asteroid comes close to Earth it may become a meteor

  16. Meteoroids, Meteors and Meteorites NEO 1994 XM1 Leonid Meteor Shower

  17. Big rocks DO fall from the sky! Fortunately for us, they don’t do it too often

  18. A bad day for the dinosaurs

  19. The impact released trillions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere The crater is buried several hundred meters under the surface and is over 200 km in diameter

  20. Fortunately, most impacts are small The Peekskill meteorite fell in 1992 and hit an 1980 Chevy Malibu. Insurance wouldn’t pay for the damage but she got $10k for the car and $69k for the meteorite from a collector.

  21. Meteorites are classified as Stones, Irons or Stony-irons

  22. The most common meteorite, stones look like ordinary rocks with burnt crust

  23. The most common “find” is an iron meteorite

  24. Widmanstätten Patterns are iron crystals that take millions of years to form The iron has to cool from the molten state at no more than a few degrees every million years to form these crystal patterns

  25. Stony-Irons are intermediate between stones and irons

  26. Carbonaceous chondrites are from the earliest age of the solar system They show the original condensation grains from the solar nebula period when they formed

  27. The different types of meteorites implies different types of parent asteroids Some asteroids have a lot of carbon materials. These are known as C-type asteroids

  28. S-type and M-type asteroids are from differentiated bodies

  29. To form S-type and M-type asteroids a larger body must be smashed to pieces

  30. Most (but not all) asteroids orbit between Mars & Jupiter

  31. The Apollo, Aten and Amor asteroids cross Earth’s orbit

  32. Most asteroids are small and irregular shaped

  33. Asteroids tumble Most have rotational periods of 9 to 10 hours

  34. Some asteroids are piles of debris 253 Mathilde

  35. We have landed on one asteroid: Eros

  36. Comets are the debris of the Outer Solar System

  37. Many comets come from the Kuiper Belt The Kuiper Belt is a thick donut shaped region extending from about 30 AU out to 50 AU. Pluto and Eris are the largest known Kuiper Belt objects

  38. Some comets come from the Oort Cloud The Oort Cloud may extend out to a lightyear (50,000 AU) from the Sun

  39. When a comet approaches the inner solar system the ice evaporates

  40. The gas and flaked off dust form a coma and tail

  41. A comets tail always points away from the Sun There are two tails: a dust tail that trails behind some and an ion tail that always points directly away from the Sun

  42. Comet tails can be millions of kilometers long

  43. The tail can break off due to “gusts” in the solar wind

  44. Comet orbits are tilted from the ecliptic and very eccentric

  45. What happens to comets?

  46. Comets “die” in one of three ways 1: They fall in to the Sun They don’t have to actually fall into the Sun, just get close enough to burn up

  47. 2: They collide with a planet or moon Shoemaker-Levy 9 had a amazing collision with Jupiter in 1994

  48. Will a comet ever hit us? The highest rated object is rated a little below 1

  49. We were probably hit by a fragment of a comet in 1908 The Tunguska event flattened over 800 square miles of forest in Siberia. It was probably an object about the size of a football field that exploded about five miles above the surface

  50. 3: They break-up and fizzle out

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