More Pondering of Pluto

Percival Lowell was certain that our solar system had a ninth planet, and began searching for it in 1905. After he died in 1916, nobody continued the search for several years. Clyde Tombaugh was able to resume the search later on, and announced the discovery in 1930. It was named Pluto by 11-year-old Venetia Burney. However, even with the best available telescopes, Pluto was only seen as a dot. It took NASA's New Horizons probe to give us a good look at it. This gave the world a passel of surprises.

Pluto and moon Charon image credit: NASA
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Although Pluto was downgraded to dwarf planet status in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union, it has five known moons. The largest is Charon. These objects have thwarted cosmic evolution stories in several ways, including how the solar system is arranged with the four more solid bodies nearest the sun, then the gas giants, and you eventually get to the trans-Neptunian objects that are rocky again.

Pluto and various moons in the solar system tend to baffle secular astronomers because they don't "act their age". Instead, several show signs of being geologically active, some even being "too warm". The indications reveal that the solar system was created far more recently than materialistic conjectures allow. Biblical creationists have some reasonable speculations to present.

Our view of Pluto changed dramatically in the summer of 2015, with the first photographs from the New Horizons spacecraft that flew past Pluto. Launched a decade earlier, New Horizons carried a suite of scientific instruments, including its superb camera, to explore Pluto in depth for the first time. To say that astronomers were shocked would be to put it mildly. Astronomers thought Pluto’s surface would be saturated with craters, but it wasn’t.

To read the entire article (or download the free MP3 version), click on "The Puzzle of Pluto".

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