Pluto has always been surrounded in controversies, earlier it was known as a planet, but less than a year ago some researchers claimed that Pluto was too small to be called a planet and it should accompany Eris and Ceres in a group known as “Dwarf Planets”.
Still this demotion made Pluto the largest in the group of Dwarf Planets. However the discovery of Eris formerly known as 2003 UB313 was like an end to all the respect that Pluto was getting. Eris lies some 14.5 billion from Earth in the Kuiper Belt. This dwarf planet has a highly elongated orbit around the Sun that lasts 560 years. Eris also has a moon known as Dysnomia.
Some measurements from the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed that Eris was larger in diameter than Pluto, since Eris was never termed as a planet so researchers at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) came to the conclusion that the planet status should be taken from Pluto and the Solar System should be classed as a system with just eight planets. This conclusion made Pluto as the biggest of the Dwarf Planets.
Researchers now have used the Keck Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope to calculate the movement of the satellite of Eris. With this information researchers were able to calculate the mass of Eris. These calculations showed that Pluto was 27% lighter than Eris. This result has again demoted our “Poor Pluto” another step down as it is not even the biggest of the Dwarf Planet.
Image: Yahoo
Via: BBC
