Dwarf planet


A dwarf planet is a planetary-mass object that does not dominate its region of space and is not a satellite. That is, it is in direct orbit of the Sun and is massive enough to be plastic – for its gravity to maintain it in a hydrostatically equilibrious shape – but has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit of other material. The prototype dwarf planet is Pluto.
The number of dwarf planets in the Solar System is unknown, as determining whether a potential body is a dwarf planet requires close observation. The half-dozen largest candidates have at least one known moon, allowing determination of their masses. The interest of dwarf planets to planetary geologists is that, being differentiated and perhaps geologically active bodies, they are likely to display planetary geology, an expectation borne out by the 2015 New Horizons mission to Pluto and Dawn mission to Ceres.
The term dwarf planet was coined by planetary scientist Alan Stern as part of a three-way categorization of planetary-mass objects in the Solar System: classical planets, dwarf planets and satellite planets. Dwarf planets were thus originally conceived of as a kind of planet, as the name suggests. However, in 2006 the term was adopted by the International Astronomical Union as a category of sub-planetary objects, part of a three-way recategorization of bodies orbiting the Sun precipitated by the discovery of Eris, an object farther away from the Sun than Neptune that was more massive than Pluto but still much smaller than the classical planets, after discoveries of a number of other objects that rivaled Pluto in size had forced a reconsideration of what Pluto was. Thus Stern and many other planetary geologists distinguish dwarf planets from classical planets, but since 2006 the IAU and the majority of astronomers have excluded bodies such as Eris and Pluto from the roster of planets altogether. This redefinition of what constitutes a planet has been both praised and criticized.

History of the concept

Starting in 1801, astronomers discovered Ceres and other bodies between Mars and Jupiter that for decades were considered to be planets. Between then and around 1851, when the number of planets had reached 23, astronomers started using the word asteroid for the smaller bodies and then stopped naming or classifying them as planets.
With the discovery of Pluto in 1930, most astronomers considered the Solar System to have nine planets, along with thousands of significantly smaller bodies. For almost 50 years Pluto was thought to be larger than Mercury, but with the discovery in 1978 of Pluto's moon Charon, it became possible to measure Pluto's mass accurately and to determine that it was much smaller than initial estimates. It was roughly one-twentieth the mass of Mercury, which made Pluto by far the smallest planet. Although it was still more than ten times as massive as the largest object in the asteroid belt, Ceres, it had only one-fifth the mass of Earth's Moon. Furthermore, having some unusual characteristics, such as large orbital eccentricity and a high orbital inclination, it became evident that it was a different kind of body from any of the other planets.
In the 1990s, astronomers began to find objects in the same region of space as Pluto, and some even farther away.
Many of these shared several of Pluto's key orbital characteristics, and Pluto started being seen as the largest member of a new class of objects, the plutinos. It became clear that either the larger of these bodies would also have to be classified as planets, or Pluto would have to be reclassified, much as Ceres had been reclassified after the discovery of additional asteroids.
This led some astronomers to stop referring to Pluto as a planet. Several terms, including subplanet and planetoid, started to be used for the bodies now known as dwarf planets.
Astronomers were also confident that more objects as large as Pluto would be discovered, and the number of planets would start growing quickly if Pluto were to remain classified as a planet.
Eris was discovered in January 2005; it was thought to be slightly larger than Pluto, and some reports informally referred to it as the tenth planet. As a consequence, the issue became a matter of intense debate during the IAU General Assembly in August 2006. The IAU's initial draft proposal included Charon, Eris, and Ceres in the list of planets. After many astronomers objected to this proposal, an alternative was drawn up by the Uruguayan astronomers Julio Ángel Fernández and Gonzalo Tancredi: they proposed an intermediate category for objects large enough to be round but which had not cleared their orbits of planetesimals. Dropping Charon from the list, the new proposal also removed Pluto, Ceres, and Eris, because they have not cleared their orbits.
The IAU's final Resolution 5A preserved this three-category system for the celestial bodies orbiting the Sun. It reads:
The IAU never did establish a process to assign borderline objects, leaving such judgements to astronomers. However, it did subsequently establish guidelines under which an IAU committee would oversee the naming of possible dwarf planets: unnamed trans-Neptunian objects with an absolute magnitude brighter than +1 were to be named by the dwarf-planet naming committee. At the time, the only bodies to meet the naming criterion were and.
These five bodies – the three under consideration in 2006 plus the two named in 2008 – are commonly presented as the dwarf planets of the Solar System by naming authorities.
However, only one of them – Pluto – has been observed in enough detail to verify that its current shapes fits what would be expected from hydrostatic equilibrium. Ceres is close to equilibrium, but some gravitational anomalies remain unexplained.
On the other hand, the astronomical community typically refers to the larger TNOs as dwarf planets. For instance, JPL/NASA characterized Gonggong as a dwarf planet after observations in 2016, and Simon Porter spoke of "the big eight dwarf planets" in 2018.
Although concerns were raised about the classification of planets orbiting other stars, the issue was not resolved; it was proposed instead to decide this only when such objects start to be observed.

Name

Names for large subplanetary bodies include dwarf planet, planetoid, meso-planet, quasi-planet and plutoid. Dwarf planet, however, was originally coined as a term for the smallest planets, not the largest sub-planets, and is still used that way by many planetary astronomers.
Alan Stern coined the term dwarf planet, analogous to the term dwarf star, as part of a three-fold classification of planets, and he and many of his colleagues continue to classify dwarf planets as a class of planets. The IAU decided that dwarf planets are not to be considered planets, but kept Stern's term for them. Other terms for the IAU definition of the largest subplanetary bodies that do not have such conflicting connotations or usage include quasi-planet
and the older term planetoid.
Michael E. Brown stated that planetoid is "a perfectly good word" that has been used for these bodies for years, and that the use of the term dwarf planet for a non-planet is "dumb", but that it was motivated by an attempt by the IAU division III plenary session to reinstate Pluto as a planet in a second resolution. Indeed, the draft of Resolution 5A had called these median bodies planetoids, but the plenary session voted unanimously to change the name to dwarf planet. The second resolution, 5B, defined dwarf planets as a subtype of planet, as Stern had originally intended, distinguished from the other eight that were to be called "classical planets". Under this arrangement, the twelve planets of the rejected proposal were to be preserved in a distinction between eight classical planets and four dwarf planets. Resolution 5B was defeated in the same session that 5A was passed. Because of the semantic inconsistency of a dwarf planet not being a planet due to the failure of Resolution 5B, alternative terms such as nanoplanet and subplanet were discussed, but there was no consensus among the CSBN to change it.
In most languages equivalent terms have been created by translating dwarf planet more-or-less literally: French planète ".
IAU Resolution 6a of 2006 recognizes Pluto as "the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects". The name and precise nature of this category were not specified but left for the IAU to establish at a later date; in the debate leading up to the resolution, the members of the category were variously referred to as plutons and plutonian objects but neither name was carried forward, perhaps due to objections from geologists that this would create confusion with their pluton.
On June 11, 2008, the IAU Executive Committee announced a name, plutoid, and a definition: all trans-Neptunian dwarf planets are plutoids. The authority of that initial announcement has not been universally recognized:
The category of 'plutoid' captured an earlier distinction between the 'terrestrial dwarf' Ceres and the 'ice dwarfs' of the outer Solar system, part of a conception of a threefold division of the Solar System into inner terrestrial planets, central gas giants and outer ice dwarfs, of which Pluto was the principal member. 'Ice dwarf' however also saw some use as an umbrella term for all trans-Neptunian minor planets, or for the ice asteroids of the outer Solar System; one attempted definition was that an ice dwarf "is larger than the nucleus of a normal comet and icier than a typical asteroid."
Before the Dawn mission, Ceres was sometimes called a 'terrestrial dwarf' to distinguish it from the 'ice dwarfs' Pluto and Eris. However, since Dawn'' it has been recognized that Ceres is an icy body more similar to the icy moons of the outer planets and to TNOs such as Pluto than it is to the terrestrial planets, blurring the distinction,
and Ceres has since been called an ice dwarf as well.

Characteristics

Orbital dominance

and Harold F. Levison introduced a parameter Λ, expressing the likelihood of an encounter resulting in a given deflection of orbit. The value of this parameter in Stern's model is proportional to the square of the mass and inversely proportional to the period. This value can be used to estimate the capacity of a body to clear the neighbourhood of its orbit, where Λ > 1 will eventually clear it. A gap of five orders of magnitude in Λ was found between the smallest terrestrial planets and the largest asteroids and Kuiper belt objects.
Using this parameter, Steven Soter and other astronomers argued for a distinction between planets and dwarf planets based on the inability of the latter to "clear the neighbourhood around their orbits": planets are able to remove smaller bodies near their orbits by collision, capture, or gravitational disturbance, whereas dwarf planets lack the mass to do so. Soter went on to propose a parameter he called the planetary discriminant, designated with the symbol µ, that represents an experimental measure of the actual degree of cleanliness of the orbital zone, where µ > 100 is deemed to be cleared.
Jean-Luc Margot refined Stern and Levison's concept to produce a similar parameter Π. It is based on theory, avoiding the empirical data used by Λ. Π > 1 indicates a planet, and there is again a gap of several orders of magnitude between planets and dwarf planets.
There are several other schemes that try to differentiate between planets and dwarf planets, but the 2006 definition uses this concept.

Hydrostatic equilibrium

Sufficient internal pressure, caused by the body's gravitation, will turn a body plastic, and sufficient plasticity will allow high elevations to sink and hollows to fill in, a process known as gravitational relaxation. Bodies smaller than a few kilometers are dominated by non-gravitational forces and tend to have an irregular shape and may be rubble piles. Larger objects, where gravitation is significant but not dominant, are "potato" shaped; the more massive the body is, the higher its internal pressure, the more solid it is and the more rounded its shape, until the pressure is sufficient to overcome its internal compressive strength and it achieves hydrostatic equilibrium. At this point a body is as round as it is possible to be, given its rotation and tidal effects, and is an ellipsoid in shape. This is the defining limit of a dwarf planet.
When an object is in hydrostatic equilibrium, a global layer of liquid covering its surface would form a liquid surface of the same shape as the body, apart from small-scale surface features such as craters and fissures. If the body does not rotate, it will be a sphere, but the faster it rotates, the more oblate or even scalene it becomes. If such a rotating body were to be heated until it melted, its overall shape would not change when liquid. The extreme example of a body that may be scalene due to rapid rotation is, which is twice as long along its major axis as it is at the poles. If the body has a massive nearby companion, then tidal forces cause its rotation to gradually slow until it is tidally locked, such that it always presents the same face to its companion. An extreme example of this is the Pluto–Charon system, where both bodies are tidally locked to each other. Tidally locked bodies are also scalene, though sometimes only slightly so. Earth's Moon is also tidally locked, as are all rounded satellites of the gas giants.
The upper and lower size and mass limits of dwarf planets have not been specified by the IAU. There is no defined upper limit, and an object larger or more massive than Mercury that has not "cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit" would be classified as a dwarf planet. The lower limit is determined by the requirements of achieving a hydrostatic equilibrium shape, but the size or mass at which an object attains this shape depends on its composition and thermal history. The original draft of the 2006 IAU resolution redefined hydrostatic equilibrium shape as applying "to objects with mass above 5 kg and diameter greater than 800 km", but this was not retained in the final draft.

Population of possible dwarf planets

The number of dwarf planets in the Solar system is not known. The three objects under consideration during the debates leading up to the 2006 IAU acceptance of the category of dwarf planet – Ceres, Pluto and Eris – are generally accepted as dwarf planets, including by those astronomers who continue to classify dwarf planets as planets. In 2015, Ceres and Pluto were determined to have shapes consistent with hydrostatic equilibrium by the Dawn and New Horizons missions, respectively, though there is still some question about Ceres. Eris is assumed to be a dwarf planet because it is more massive than Pluto.
In order of discovery, these three bodies are:
  1. – discovered January 1, 1801 and announced January 24, 45 years before Neptune. Considered a planet for half a century before reclassification as an asteroid. Considered a dwarf planet by the IAU since the adoption of Resolution 5A on August 24, 2006. Confirmation is pending.
  2. ♇ – discovered February 18, 1930 and announced March 13. Considered a planet for 76 years. Explicitly reclassified as a dwarf planet by the IAU with Resolution 6A on August 24, 2006. Five known moons.
  3. – discovered January 5, 2005 and announced July 29. Called the "tenth planet" in media reports. Considered a dwarf planet by the IAU since the adoption of Resolution 5A on August 24, 2006, and named by the IAU dwarf-planet naming committee on September 13 of that year. One known moon.
Due to the 2008 decision to assign the naming of Haumea and Makemake to the dwarf-planet naming committee and their announcement as dwarf planets in IAU press releases, these two bodies are also generally accepted as dwarf planets:
Four additional bodies meet the criteria of Brown, Tancredi et al. and Grundy et al. for candidate objects:
Additional bodies have been proposed, such as and by Brown, or and by Tancredi et al. Most of the larger bodies have moons, which enables a determination of their masses and thus their densities, which inform estimates as to whether they could be dwarf planets. The largest TNOs that are not known to have moons are Sedna, and.
At the time Makemake and Haumea were named, it was thought that trans-Neptunian objects with icy cores would require a diameter of only perhaps 400 km —about 3% of that of Earth—to relax into gravitational equilibrium. Researchers thought that the number of such bodies could prove to be around 200 in the Kuiper belt, with thousands more beyond.
This was one of the reasons that Pluto was reclassified in the first place.
However, research since then has cast doubt on the idea that bodies that small could have achieved or maintained equilibrium under common conditions.
Individual astronomers have recognized a number of such objects as dwarf planets or as highly likely to prove to be dwarf planets. In 2008, Tancredi et al. advised the IAU to officially accept Orcus, Sedna and Quaoar as dwarf planets, though the IAU did not address the issue then and has not since. In addition, Tancredi considered the five TNOs,,,, and to be mostly likely dwarf planets as well. In 2012, Stern stated that there are more than a dozen known dwarf planets, though he did not specify which they were.
Since 2011, Brown has maintained a list of hundreds of candidate objects, ranging from "nearly certain" to "possible" dwarf planets, based solely on estimated size.
As of 13 September 2019, Brown's list identifies ten trans-Neptunian objects with diameters greater than 900 km as "near certain" to be dwarf planets, and another 16, with diameters greater than 600 km, as "highly likely". Notably, Gonggong may have a larger diameter than Pluto's largest moon Charon. Pinilla-Alonso et al. propose that the surface compositions of 40 bodies possibly larger than 450 km in diameter be compared with the planned James Webb Space Telescope.
However, in 2019 Grundy et al. proposed that dark, low-density bodies smaller than about 900–1000 km in diameter, such as Salacia and Varda, never fully collapsed into solid planetary bodies and retain internal porosity from their formation, while accepting that brighter or denser Orcus and Quaoar probably were fully solid.
Observations in 2017–2019 led researchers to suggest that the large icy asteroids 10 Hygiea and 704 Interamnia may be transitional between dwarf planets and smaller objects.

Most likely dwarf planets

The following Trans-Neptunian objects are agreed by Brown, Tancredi et al. and Grundy et al. to be probably dwarf planets. Charon, a moon of Pluto that was proposed as a dwarf planet by the IAU in 2006, is included for comparison. Those objects that have absolute magnitudes greater than +1, and so meet the criteria for the dwarf-planet naming committee of the IAU, are highlighted, as is Ceres, which has been accepted as a dwarf planet by the IAU since they first debated the concept, though it has not yet been demonstrated to meet the definition.

Exploration

On March 6, 2015, the Dawn spacecraft began to orbit Ceres, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a dwarf planet. On July 14, 2015, the New Horizons space probe flew by Pluto and its five moons.
Ceres displays such planetary-geologic features as surface salt deposits and cryovolcanos, while Pluto has water-ice mountains drifting in nitrogen-ice glaciers, as well as of course an atmosphere.
For both bodies, there is at least the possibility of a subsurface ocean or brine layer.
Dawn has also orbited the former dwarf planet Vesta. Phoebe has been explored by Cassini and Voyager 2, which also explored Neptune's moon Triton. These three bodies are thought to be former dwarf planets and therefore their exploration helps in the study of the evolution of dwarf planets.

Contention regarding the reclassification of Pluto

In the immediate aftermath of the IAU definition of dwarf planet, some scientists expressed their disagreement with the IAU resolution. Campaigns included car bumper stickers and T-shirts. Mike Brown agrees with the reduction of the number of planets to eight.
NASA has announced that it will use the new guidelines established by the IAU. Alan Stern, the director of NASA's mission to Pluto, rejects the current IAU definition of planet, both in terms of defining dwarf planets as something other than a type of planet, and in using orbital characteristics of objects to define them as dwarf planets. Thus, in 2011, he still referred to Pluto as a planet, and accepted other likely dwarf planets such as Ceres and Eris, as well as the larger moons, as additional planets. Several years before the IAU definition, he used orbital characteristics to separate "überplanets" from "unterplanets", considering both types "planets".

Bodies resembling dwarf planets

A number of bodies physically resemble dwarf planets. This include former dwarf planets, which may still have an equilibrium shape; planetary-mass moons, which meet the physical but not the orbital definition for dwarf planets; and Charon in the Pluto–Charon system, which is arguably a binary dwarf planet. The categories may overlap: Triton, for example, is both a former dwarf planet and a planetary-mass moon.

Former dwarf planets

, the next-most-massive body in the asteroid belt after Ceres, was once in hydrostatic equilibrium and is roughly spherical, deviating mainly because of massive impacts that formed the Rheasilvia and Veneneia craters after it solidified.
Its dimensions are not consistent with it currently being in hydrostatic equilibrium.
Triton is more massive than Eris or Pluto, has an equilibrium shape, and is thought to be a captured dwarf planet, but no longer directly orbits the sun.
Phoebe is a captured centaur that, like Vesta, is no longer in hydrostatic equilibrium, but is thought to have been so early in its history due to radiogenic heating.
Evidence from 2019 suggests that Theia, the former planet that collided with Earth in the giant-impact hypothesis, may have originated in the outer Solar System rather than in the inner Solar System and that Earth's water originated on Theia, thus implying that Theia may have been a former dwarf planet from the Kuiper Belt.

Planetary-mass moons

Nineteen moons have an equilibrium shape from having relaxed under their own gravity at some point in their history, though some have since frozen solid and are no longer in equilibrium. Seven are more massive than either Eris or Pluto. These moons are not physically distinct from the dwarf planets, but do not fit the IAU definition because they do not directly orbit the Sun. Alan Stern calls planetary-mass moons "satellite planets", one of three categories of planet, together with dwarf planets and classical planets. The term planemo also covers all three populations.

Charon

There has been some debate as to whether the Pluto–Charon system should be considered a double dwarf planet.
In a draft resolution for the IAU definition of planet, both Pluto and Charon were considered planets in a binary system. The IAU currently states that Charon is not considered to be a dwarf planet but rather is a satellite of Pluto, although the idea that Charon might qualify as a dwarf planet in its own right may be considered at a later date. However, it is no longer clear that Charon is in hydrostatic equilibrium. Further, the location of the barycenter depends not only on the relative masses of the bodies, but also on the distance between them; the barycenter of the Sun–Jupiter orbit, for example, lies outside the Sun, but they are not considered a binary object.