Pluto was discovered in 1930 but had been theorized since the late 1800s when Neptune was discovered. It took decades of searching and telescope improvements to identify Pluto. However, in 2005, a new discovery changed the perspective on Pluto. A dwarf planet, known as Eris was discovered. Eris was smaller, but had more mass than Pluto, leading the International Astronomers Union, which sets the definitions of objects in space, to redefine planet, excluding Pluto. However, a recent study has questioned the veracity of the redefinition and called for Pluto to be restored to planetary status.
Pluto was demoted from being a planet for a very curious reason. It fails to clear its orbit. This phrasing is a little obscure but basically, it means that the object is the largest gravitational force in its orbit. The newly released study did a literature review for the last two hundred years and found just one instance where this definition was used to define planets. That instance was in 1802 and was later proved to have been based on faulty logic. The studies lead author, Dr. Philip Metzger said “The IAU definition would say that the fundamental object of planetary science, the planet, is supposed to be a defined on the basis of a concept that nobody uses in their research…” In other words, the definition of a planet used by IAU is not even used by scientists in their research. Metzger goes even further. “They didn’t say what they meant by clearing their orbit. If you take that literally, then there are no planets, because no planet clears its orbit.” He’s right because technically, the sun is the biggest gravitational force in every planet’s orbit.
So why was Pluto demoted in the first place? The first thing to consider is that the entire IAU did not vote on demoting Pluto. Only a tiny minority of them, roughly 4%, were present in Prague when the vote was conducted. However, there is likely an underlying reason. Pluto as a planet has been a massive black eye for Big Bang cosmology. By demoting it to dwarf planetary status, perhaps the IAU hope to eliminate this painful blemish on the evolutionary theory. However, by doing so, they have simply brought attention to the problems with the astronomical hierarchy and the evolution of “trans-Neptunian objects”.
Evolutionists believe Pluto formed around 4.6 billion years ago as part of what is called the nebular hypothesis. The nebular hypothesis postulates that the solar system began as a nebula full of solar dust and gas. Gravity eventually caused the center to fall in on itself and form the sun. After the sun formed, solar winds caused the lighter materials to be forced to the outer solar system, where they formed the gas giant planets. In the inner solar system, the rocky materials leftover coalesced into the inner planets. The theory predicted little to no water on the outer planets. It also predicted that, since Pluto was very old, it would be pockmarked with craters. Further, because it is old, it should not have any geological activity and should have cooled to equilibrium.
A few years ago a spacecraft finally made it to Pluto to explore the hypotheses that scientists had made about its structure, origin, and age. Not surprisingly to the creationist, they were shocked by what they found. The surface was almost entirely devoid of craters. NASA was forced to admit the surface did not look more than 100 million years old. That’s a major problem for a planet supposed to be 4.6 billion years old. 4.5 billion years are missing. Where did they go? Of course, the evidence could be interpreted to give Pluto an age of around say 6000 years, but that’s not an acceptable explanation to the evolutionist. Further, the spacecraft revealed that Pluto likely has mountains of frozen water. This is completely unexpected. In fact, some of these mountains are believed to be ice volcanos, spewing liquid nitrogen. Yet Pluto is too old to be geologically active according to astronomers.
Pluto has other problems for evolution. It has a retrograde, or backward orbit. Its atmosphere is being blown off into space by solar wind. If it was 4.6 billion years old, there should be no atmosphere left. It has a large moon called Charon that makes tidal energy impossible as a source of the energy for the ice volcanos. All these are problems evolution cannot explain.
Unsurprisingly, the evolutionists have chosen to question the physics behind their predictions, rather than the age of the planet. Alan Stern, the person in charge of the expedition to Pluto, told Smithsonian magazine “We now have an isolated small planet that’s showing activity after 4.5 billion years… I think it’s going to send a lot of geophysicists back to the drawing board.” So in other words, 4.5 billion years is sacred but the physics, based observation is not. To put this bluntly, evolutionists would rather abandon observational science, than abandon millions of years. That is the basis of a religion, not impartial, empirical science.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/09/180907110422.htm
In His Image 