Origin of Pluto and its moons

Before the discovery of Charon, it was popular to assume that Pluto was a former moon of Neptune that had somehow escaped its orbit. This idea gained support from the apparent similarity of the dimensions of Pluto and Triton and the near coincidence in Triton’s orbital period (5.9 days) and Pluto’s rotation period (6.4 days). It was suggested that a close encounter between these two bodies when they were both moons led to the ejection of Pluto from the Neptunian system and caused Triton to assume the retrograde orbit that is presently observed.

Astronomers found it difficult to establish the likelihood that all these events would have occurred, and the discovery of Charon provided information that further refuted the theory. Because the revised mass of Pluto is only half that of Triton, Pluto clearly could not have caused the reversal of Triton’s orbit. Also, the fact that Pluto has a proportionally large moon of its own makes the escape idea implausible. Current thinking favours the idea that Pluto and Charon instead formed as two independent bodies in the solar nebula, the gaseous cloud from which the solar system condensed (see solar system: Origin of the solar system). A collision between Pluto and a proto-Charon could have produced a debris ring around Pluto that accreted by gravitational attraction to form the present moon. This scenario is similar to the currently favoured model for the formation of the Moon as a result of the collision of a Mars-sized body with Earth (see Moon: Origin and evolution). Just as the Moon appears to be deficient in volatile elements relative to Earth as a consequence of its high-temperature origin, so also can the absence of methane on Charon, along with the relatively high densities of both Pluto and Charon, be explained by a similar process.

Astronomers have argued that Pluto’s four small moons also are products of the same collision that resulted in the present Charon. The alternative scenario—that they formed independently elsewhere in the outer solar system and were later gravitationally captured by the Pluto-Charon system—does not appear likely given the combination of circular coplanar orbits and multiple dynamic resonances that currently exist for the two small bodies and Charon. Rather, these conditions suggest that material in the ring of debris that was ejected from the collision accreted into all three moons—and possibly into others yet to be found.

This collision scenario implies that at the time the Pluto-Charon system formed, about 4.6 billion years ago, the outer solar nebula contained many icy bodies with the same approximate dimensions as these two. The bodies themselves are thought to have been built up from smaller entities that today would be recognized as the nuclei of comets. Triton is presumably another of these large icy planetesimals, captured into orbit by Neptune in the planet’s early history. Chiron, a small body orbiting the Sun between Saturn and Uranus and believed to be a giant comet nucleus, and Phoebe, a moon of Saturn, represent somewhat smaller examples of such objects.

Most of these icy planetesimals were incorporated into the cores of the giant planets during their formation. Many others, however, are thought to have remained as the unconsolidated debris that makes up the Kuiper belt—a thick disk-shaped region, flattened toward the plane of the solar system, that lies beyond Neptune’s orbit and, significantly, includes the outer part of Pluto’s orbit. Billions more icy objects were scattered to the outermost reaches of the solar system during the formation of Uranus and Neptune; they are believed to form the Oort cloud, a huge spherical shell surrounding the solar system at a distance of some 50,000 AU. After more than a thousand Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) were directly observed starting in the early 1990s, astronomers came to the conclusion that Pluto and Charon likely are large members of the Kuiper belt and that bodies such as Chiron, Neptune’s moon Triton, and a number of other icy moons of the outer planets originated as KBOs. In fact, like Pluto, there is one group of KBOs having highly eccentric orbits inclined to the plane of the solar system and exhibiting the same stabilizing 3:2 orbital resonance with Neptune. In recognition of this affinity, astronomers named this group of objects Plutinos (“little Plutos”).

Pluto’s status as a solar system member

Prior to the removal of Pluto from the official list of planets, astronomers had never established a rigorous scientific definition of a solar system planet, nor had they agreed on a minimum mass, radius, or mechanism of origin for a body to qualify as one. The traditional “instinctive” distinctions between the larger planetary bodies of the solar system, their moons, and small bodies such as asteroids and comets were made when their differences had seemed more profound and clear-cut and when the nature of the small bodies as remnant building blocks of the planets was dimly perceived. This early, disjointed conception of the solar system was in some ways analogous to the situation described by the Indian fable of the blind men, each of whom identified a different object after touching a different part of the same elephant. It later became clear that the original groupings of the components of the solar system required reclassification under a set of more-complex, interrelated definitions.

If Pluto had been discovered in the context of the Kuiper belt rather than as an isolated entity, it might never have been ranked with the eight planets. Indeed, in the decades after Pluto’s discovery, some astronomers continued to question its planetary status in view of its small size, icy composition, and anomalous orbital characteristics. Moreover, about the turn of the 21st century, astronomers observed several KBOs that are each roughly the size of Charon and one, named Eris, that is slightly larger than Pluto itself. Because Pluto was no longer unique in the outer reaches of the solar system, it became incumbent on astronomers either to admit additional members into the planetary ranks or to exclude Pluto. In 2006 the IAU voted to take the latter course while establishing the category of dwarf planets to recognize the larger, more-massive members of a given population of objects having similar compositions and origins and occupying the same orbital “neighbourhood.” Thus, Pluto, Eris, and Ceres—Ceres, with a diameter of some 940 km (585 miles), is the largest object in the asteroid belt—were designated dwarf planets. In June 2008 the IAU created a subcategory within the dwarf planet category, called plutoids, for all dwarf planets that are farther from the Sun than Neptune—that is, bodies that are large KBOs. Pluto and Eris are plutoids; Ceres, because of its location in the asteroid belt, is not. Since then, two more KBOs, Makemake and Haumea, have been designated dwarf planets and plutoids.