Pluto’ a Planet Once Again: NASA Chief
The controversy over Pluto to be reclassified as a planet has always been underway. This time, the debate has been once again pulled over by NASA chief, who strongly believes that the celestial body is a planet.
In his recent speech at the FIRST Robotics Event in Oklahoma, the NASA chief, Jim Bridenstine said that he goes against the convention that Pluto is not a planet.
A video that has been shared by meteorologist Cory Reppenhagen on Twitter shows Bridenstine states, “Just so you know, in my view Pluto as a planet.” He further added that “You can write that the Nasa administrator declared Pluto a planet once again.
I’m sticking by that, it’s the way I learned it and I’m committed to it. “My favorite sound byte of the day that probably won’t make it to TV. It came from NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. As a Pluto Supporter, I really appreciated this.
NASA’s statement goes against the official decision of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), which demoted Pluto as a planet in 2006 and classified it as a dwarf planet. The decision to exclude Pluto from the ‘planet-hood’ was all the more affirming after the discovery of another distant celestial body, Eris, in 2005 which led IAU to lay down three guidelines.
These three guidelines had to be adhered to by anybody to officially constitute itself as a planet. However, Pluto didn’t fall under all the guidelines due to its placement in the Kuiper Belt and along with Eris, it was put under the belt of dwarf planets.
Following years of debate, and the 2005 discovery of Eris, a distant object even larger than Pluto, the IAU stripped Pluto of its planetary status. Pluto was discovered by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 and then it was considered as the ninth planet of the Solar System.
