• Question: Why can't dwarf planets be classed as planets?

    Asked by funkymonkey to Adam, Catherine, Karen, Leila, Nazim on 16 Mar 2012.
    • Photo: Leila Battison

      Leila Battison answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Isn’t it cool enough for them to have their own special gang to be in?!

      Dwarf planets are different from real planets in more ways than just being smaller. Because they have less mass they are irregularly shaped, so don’t look much like a planet. Also many of them don’t have a neat circular orbit like the normal planets, they go round at an angle to the sun and might get closer and further away each time they go round.

      They’re really more like asteroids than real planets, so calling them dwarf planets is doing them a favour!

    • Photo: Adam Stevens

      Adam Stevens answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      They could. In the end it’s just a name. We could call everything in the solar system a planet, but it wouldn’t really make sense as there are fairly obvious groups to put them in. These groups have changed over time as we got more information about the solar system.

      When we first discovered Pluto we knew very little about it. As we found out more about it it looked less and less like a planet.

    • Photo: Karen Masters

      Karen Masters answered on 16 Mar 2012:

      Astronomers just wanted to give them their own class as they’re so different from the other planets. Plus if they were planets you’d have to learn all their names – that’s 13 at the moment, and we think lots more out their near Pluto to find. I can’t even remember the names of the current 5 dwarf planets! 😉

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