32 When One Planet Isn't Enough: Celebrating 25 Years of Solar System Exploration
Sunday, 22 October 2006
1:30 PM - 5:30 PM
THE NATURE OF PLUTO AND OBJECTS ON THE RIM OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM
Paper number: 32-12
Program: Technical Sessions
Time: 5:10 PM – 5:30 PM
Authors
Abstract
A revolution has taken place in the past 15 years in our understanding of the architecture of our solar system. What once appeared to be a system of nine planets made up of 4 terrestrial planets, 4 giant planets, and a "misfit" called Pluto is now seen to incread be a system with many dozens of not hundreds of Pluto-like objects constituting the most populous class of planetary bodies in the solar system: the "ice dwarfs." This new class of planet resides primarily in the Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud. I will discuss how observations and theory have merged to reveal this new paradigm.