In
2006, Pluto, believed for decades to be the ninth planet of our solar system, suffered
the humiliation of being downgraded to a dwarf planet. Pluto was originally discovered back in 1930. In that year, H.P. Lovecraft began to publish
most of the sonnets that would later comprise his book of poetry, Fungi from Yuggoth. He also published his excellent The Whisperer in Darkness, in 1931. That story told of the depredations of a
colony of extraterrestrials from the ninth planet, the fictional Yuggoth.
Many
assumed that the world of Yuggoth was modeled on the recently discovered
Pluto. Alas, most of a century later the
cold dark world was reclassified, and so by implication was Yuggoth. So the search for extreme trans-Neptunian
objects, a few of which may turn out to be bona fide planets, continues.
Newly
discovered bodies in the solar system must meet certain criteria to be labeled
as planets: the nominee must first orbit
the sun, it must have sufficient size, mass and gravitational force to form
itself into a sphere, and it must have enough gravitational force to either
absorb nearby asteroids and debris or fling them out of its orbital path—that
is, it must not share its orbit with another body. These criteria were developed by the
International Astronomical Union in 2006.
Pluto failed the third test; it shares its orbit with other objects in
the Kuiper belt, and comes perilously close to Neptune’s orbit. (This July, NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft
will swing by Pluto for a close look.)
Pluto
joins four other objects now officially classified as dwarf planets: Ceres.
Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. But there
may be hundreds more, especially further out in the Kuiper belt, a disk-shaped
region of the solar system composed of comets, asteroids, icy debris, and
planet-like objects that extends beyond the orbit of Neptune. Comets that pass by Earth every 200 years or
less, for example Halley’s Comet, are thought to originate in the Kuiper belt,
sometimes referred to as the “comet belt”.
This
week brought news of the possible discovery of two new planets, larger than
Earth, in this region of the solar system.
These are “ETNOs”, or extreme trans-Neptunian objects. Because they are invisible to direct
observation with current instruments, their presence is detected through
anomalies in their orbits and those of surrounding objects. This effect is explained as the “Kozai
mechanism”, in which a large body gravitationally disturbs the orbit of smaller,
more distant objects.
One
scientist described this as observing a collection of asteroids in a stable
orbit being “shepherded” by a distant, unknown planet of considerable
magnitude. Whether there are genuine
planets far out in the Kuiper belt is still debated, but recent research
suggests the possibility that planets can still form despite great distances
from the center of a solar system. Calculations suggest that the two planets are
located almost 200 astronomical units from the center of our solar system—one
astronomical unit being the distance of the Earth to the sun, (93 million
miles). One of these planets may be ten
times the size of our planet.
The
search for a ninth planet to replace Pluto continues, and with this search,
Yuggoth’s location is pushed ever further out into the cold and dark of
space. This location, far out in the Kuiper
belt, beyond Neptune, where comets roam and icy worlds take centuries to orbit
a faraway sun, is probably what H.P. Lovecraft had in mind with his famous
couplet: “I have seen the dark universe yawning/Where the black planets roll
without aim—/Where they roll in their horror unheeded/Without knowledge or lustre
or name.”
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