Pluto, Eris, and the Dwarf Planets of the Outer Solar System

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Pluto, Eris, and the Dwarf Planets of the Outer Solar System
Presenter: Mike Brown
Tuesday, March 20, 2007

The Kuiper Belt is a mysterious region beyond Neptune and stretching more than four billion miles from the Sun. Using powerful telescopes, scientists are scouring the Belt and beyond, finding hundreds of small frigid objects such as Eris, which is larger than Pluto and takes 560 years to orbit the Sun; and smaller Sedna, with an elliptical orbit that takes more than 10,000 years to complete. Join Mike Brown as he describes the hunt for these ancient and elusive worlds.

Mike Brown is Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology and the discoverer, along with colleagues, of Eris (formerly 2003 UB313), Sedna, and other distant bodies. The 2007 Exploring Space Lectures, Journey Through the Outer Solar System, will feature four world-class scholars discussing current missions to the distant realm of the gas giants, the icy Kuiper Belt, and beyond.

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  Education

[dreamsNdemise]

He sounds like Kermit the Frog.

[1BYEBYE1]

ITS BILL GATES!

[Megneous]

At 1:05:44, he claims that massive planets should have circular orbits. This was recorded in 2007. Now, 6 years later, we know that this isn't always the case. There are MANY exoplanets now that have been discovered that are called hot Jupiters, gas giants that come incredibly close to their stars on highly elliptical orbits.

6 years can change a lot of things about how we view the universe. I wonder what we'll know in 2020.

[SUPERKNOWZ]

Uranus is my favorite planet -also i didn't know that Neptune does tug jobs

[zohanthecat]

pluto is the one true religion

[GYGABITE1]

gtfo

[alkDeflamboro]

I only watch these videos because the funny transcribed captions

[ColKorn1965]

Pluto got shafted

[BloodMilitia]

Hahaha... He said "chairman of the Earth"

[zingodoom]

To me, our Solar System will always have 13 planets. So unless Tyche is discovered soon, I don't care what people say.

[Pj Landin]

Holy diploma, Batman, can you say analogy? It's pretty obvious you haven't listened to a word he said. Where did you hear him state that Pluto was a religion?

[Peter Rutten]

Just because Pluto isn't classified as a planet anymore doesn't mean that it's not of any importance no more, because it is. Remember that Pluto is in a region of the Solar System that forms part of the Trans-Neptune objects or as it's better known as, the inner part of the Kuiper Belt, and with the New Horizons spacecraft speeding towards Pluto and the Kuiper Belt as we speak, the next few years are going to be really exciting from a scientific point of view.