JimT wrote: ↑Sat Nov 16, 2024 6:33 pm
JimT wrote: ↑Sat Nov 16, 2024 6:25 pm
Clarification, just for the record:
Tenzing Montes
Feature type Mountain range
Location Western Sputnik Planitia, Pluto
Discoverer New Horizons
Eponym Tenzing Norgay
"The Tenzing Montes /ˈtɛnzɪŋ ˈmɒntiːz/ (formerly Norgay Montes) are a range of icy mountains on Pluto, bordering the southwest region of Sputnik Planitia and the nearby Hillary Montes...
The mountains, first viewed by the New Horizons spacecraft on 14 July 2015, and announced by NASA on 15 July 2015, are named after the Nepalese mountaineer Tenzing Norgay...The mountains were informally called Norgay Montes by the New Horizons team, but that name was later changed from Norgay to Tenzing. On 7 September 2017..."
— Wikipedia
Astonishing image in any case, especially to one who was a teenager in 1957, and can well remember the excitement when Sputnik I was launched in October of that year.
"Reasons Why Pluto Is a Dwarf Planet
Pluto orbits the Sun and meets the second criterion, which is a nearly round shape. However, it has difficulty with the other criteria for planethood.
It resides in the Kuiper Belt, a region of small icy bodies, signifying that it has not cleared its neighborhood of other objects. But, clearing an orbit is about mass and not just about location. Pluto is about two-thirds the size of Earth’s moon, but only one-sixth of its mass. It contains a larger proportion of ice to rock than a typical planet and just doesn’t pull in the debris it encounters on its journey around the Sun.
The other issues concern Pluto’s moon, Charon. Pluto has at least five moons, but Charon is special because it’s about half the size of Pluto. It is so massive that the center of mass (barycenter) of the Pluto-Charon system doesn’t actually reside within Pluto, but in the space between the two bodies. Due to this unique characteristic, some argue that Pluto and Charon are a binary (dwarf) planet system. In other words, Pluto and Charon are essentially satellites of each other. However, the IAU has yet to officially recognize binary dwarf planets as a separate category."
Source: https://sciencenotes.org/is-pluto-a-planet/
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