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The discovery of Eris in 2005 was one of the biggest disruptions in the scientific community. In January 2005, the dwarf planet Eris was discovered by Michael Brown. At the time, it was thought to be bigger than Pluto by 500 km. The discovery raised many questions, one of the most important ones being: should Eris be added as the next planet after Pluto? Scientists had to make a tough choice, as the discovery of Eris opened up the possibility of the existence of other large objects of similar size in the outer solar system. On what factors would they make the choice? This is the story of how the discovery of Eris led to the declassification of Pluto as a planet.
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00:00 Intro
1:01 the story of eris
5.06 dysnomia moon
7:08 What about pluto?
From its distance from the sun, to how it helped change the definition of a planet, and more! Join me as I show you Eris: Facts and History!
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8. What Is Eris?
Depending on your familiarity with our solar system, you may or may not know about Eris, and for good reason based on its location and how it relates to other planets and celestial objects in the system.
In short, Eris is one of the largest known dwarf planets in our solar system. For those who don’t know, a Dwarf Planet is one that has the size and shape of a planet but fails to meet certain technical qualifications to be considered a full planet. Eris is about the same size as Pluto, but is three times farther from the Sun. Making it something on the very edges of our solar system. In fact, outside of some comets that have been discovered and a “unique object” from 2018, the two are the most distant known objects in our solar system.
Eris first appeared to be larger than Pluto. This triggered a debate in the scientific community that led to the International Astronomical Union’s decision in 2006 to clarify the definition of a planet. Pluto, Eris and other similar objects are now classified as dwarf planets.
Originally designated 2003 UB313 (and nicknamed for the television warrior Xena by its discovery team), Eris is named for the ancient Greek goddess of discord and strife. The name fits since it remains at the center of a scientific debate about the definition of a planet.
7. The Discovery Of Eris
Given all we just told you, the discovery of this dwarf planet is really significant.
Eris was discovered by the team of Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz on January 5, 2005, from images taken in October of 2003. The discovery was announced in July 2005, the same day as Makemake and two days after Haumea (two other dwarf planets), due in part to events that would later lead to controversy about Haumea. The search team had been systematically scanning for large outer Solar System bodies for several years, and had been involved in the discovery of several other large TNOs, including 50000 Quaoar, 90482 Orcus, and 90377 Sedna.
The reason that Eris wasn’t discovered right away via the images in 2003 was very simple, Eris was moving so slowly that scientists weren’t able to detect it. The team at the Palomar Observatory had automatic image-searching software that excluded all objects moving at less than 1.5 arcseconds per hour to reduce the number of false positives returned.
When Sedna was discovered in 2003, it was moving at 1.75 arcsec/h, and in light of that the team reanalyzed their old data with a lower limit on the angular motion, sorting through the previously excluded images by eye. In January 2005, the re-analysis revealed Eris’s slow motion against the background stars. Thus leading to its true discovery.
After that, the team dedicated itself to learning more about the soon-to-be-named dwarf planet, mainly learning what kind of orbit it had, and eventually learning the discovery that it had a moon within its orbit.
6. The Xena Name
I’m sure some of you out there were a bit curious as to why a scientific team would nickname a planet “Xena” after the legendary TV show featuring Lucy Lawless. Granted, that’s not the name the Dwarf Planet has now, but the story behind this nickname is honestly rather unique to our solar system.
Due to uncertainty over whether the object would be classified as a planet or a minor planet, because different nomenclature procedures apply to these different classes of objects (which would lead to the demoting of Pluto not long after Eris’ discovery and classification), the decision on what to name the object had to wait until after the August 24, 2006 IAU ruling. As a result, for a time the object became known to the wider public as Xena.
But why that one? “Xena” was an informal name used internally by the discovery team. It was inspired by the title character of the television series Xena: Warrior Princess. The discovery team had reportedly saved the nickname “Xena” for the first body they discovered that was larger than Pluto. According to Mike Brown, who was part of the team that discovered the dwarf planet:
“We chose it since it started with an X (planet “X”), it sounds mythological (OK, so it’s TV mythology, but Pluto is named after a cartoon, right?), and (this part is actually true) we’ve been working to get more female deities out there (e.g. Sedna).
From what the belt is, to how it’s helped change the classification of the solar system, and more! Join me as I reveal to you the facts and history of the Kuiper Belt!
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9. What Is The Kuiper Belt?
Despite it being a major part of our solar system, there are many who honestly don’t understand the grand scale and scope of the Kuiper Belt. So allow us to give you some perspective on the matter.
The Kuiper Belt is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20 to 200 times as massive.
Like the asteroid belt, it consists mainly of small bodies or remnants from when the Solar System formed. While many asteroids are composed primarily of rock and metal, most Kuiper belt objects are composed largely of frozen volatiles (termed “ices”), such as methane, ammonia and water.
The Kuiper belt is home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake. Some of the Solar System’s moons, such as Neptune’s Triton and Saturn’s Phoebe, may have originated in the region.
In many respects, the Kuiper Belt is the “end” of our solar system in terms of things like the physical objects that are there and reachable. The “edge” of the solar system is a slightly different matter as that would either be the Heliosphere (if you go by magnetic fields) or the Oort Cloud, which is where the suns’ gravity reaches the end of its influence.
But either way, the Kuiper Belt is a major part of our solar system in the literal and figurative sense. Which is rather interesting when you think about it because for a very long time we didn’t understand what was truly in that realm of space as a whole.
8. The Discovery Of The Kuiper Belt
To truly understand the Kuiper Belt, we have to dive into something you’re very familiar with, Pluto.
After the discovery of Pluto in 1930, many speculated that it might not be alone. The region now called the Kuiper belt was hypothesized in various forms for decades. It was only in 1992 that the first direct evidence for its existence was found. The number and variety of prior speculations on the nature of the Kuiper belt have led to continued uncertainty as to who deserves credit for first proposing it.
But let’s go back to the beginning and just break it down from there, shall we?
The first astronomer to suggest the existence of a trans-Neptunian population was Frederick C. Leonard. Soon after Pluto’s discovery by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, Leonard pondered whether it was “not likely that in Pluto there has come to light the first of a series of ultra-Neptunian bodies, the remaining members of which still await discovery but which are destined eventually to be detected”.
That same year, astronomer Armin O. Leuschner suggested that Pluto “may be one of many long-period planetary objects yet to be discovered.”
This is fascinating for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that the discovery of Pluto should have been a finite discovery, or one that led to more study of the planet and what it could mean as a whole. Yet many scientists looked upon it and wondered if it was telling us everything we needed to know about the region.
In 1943, in the Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Kenneth Edgeworth hypothesized that, in the region beyond Neptune, the material within the primordial solar nebula was too widely spaced to condense into planets, and so rather condensed into a myriad of smaller bodies.
From this he concluded that “the outer region of the solar system, beyond the orbits of the planets, is occupied by a very large number of comparatively small bodies” and that, from time to time, one of their number “wanders from its own sphere and appears as an occasional visitor to the inner solar system”, becoming a comet.
That’s not a bad way to describe what the Kuiper Belt really is, and he was right that by modern classifications, the various items in the belt weren’t able to go and become fully-fledged planets. But more on that in a bit.
Before we continue to break down everything that’s going on with the Kuiper Belt, be sure to like or dislike the video, that way we can continue to improve our content for you, the viewer! Also be sure to subscribe so that you don’t miss ANY of our weekly videos!
7. Continued Theories
The more that astronomers wondered about the Kuiper Belt, the more that speculations rose and fell about what it is, what it could be, what it could’ve been, and more.
