A Case for Ten Planets

Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997) spent the first fifteen years of his life on a farm near Streator, Illinois, and then his family moved to a farm near Burdett, Kansas (no wonder he got interested in astronomy!), and he went to high school there. Then, on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh, a self-taught amateur astronomer and telescope maker, discovered the ninth planet in our solar system, Pluto. It had been nearly 84 years since the eighth planet, Neptune, had been discovered, in 1846. And it would be another 62 years before another trans-Neptunian object (TNO) would be discovered.

Clyde Tombaugh made his discovery using a 13-inch f/5.3 photographic refractor at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona.

Clyde Tombaugh was 24 years old when he discovered Pluto. He died in 1997 at the age of 90 (almost 91). I was very fortunate to meet Prof. Tombaugh at a lecture he gave at Iowa State University in 1990. At that lecture, he told a fascinating story about the discovery of Pluto, and I remember well his comment that he felt certain that no “tenth planet” larger than Pluto exists in our solar system, because of the thorough searches he and others had done since his discovery of Pluto. But, those searches were done before the CCD revolution, and just two years later, the first TNO outside the Pluto-Charon system, 15760 Albion (1992 QB1), would be discovered by David Jewitt (1958-) and Jane Luu (1963-), although only 1/9th the size of Pluto.

Pluto is, by far, the smallest of the nine planets. At only 2,377 km across, Pluto is only 2/3 the size of our Moon! Pluto has a large moon called Charon (pronounced SHAR-on) that is 1,212 km across (over half the size of Pluto), discovered in 1978 by James Christy (1938-). Two additional moons were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in 2005: Hydra (50.9 × 36.1 × 30.9 km) and Nix (49.8 × 33.2 × 31.1 km). A fourth moon was discovered using HST in 2011: Kerberos (10 × 9 × 9 km). And a fifth moon, again using HST, in 2012: Styx (16 × 9 × 8 km).

Pluto has been visited by a single spacecraft. New Horizons passed 12,472 km from Pluto and 28,858 km from Charon on July 14, 2015. Then, about 3½ years later, New Horizons passed 3,538 km from 486958 Arrokoth, on January 1, 2019.

Only one other TNO comparable in size to Pluto (or larger) is known to exist. 136199 Eris and its moon Dysnomia were discovered in 2005 by Mike Brown (1965-), Chad Trujillo (1973-), and David Rabinowitz (1960-). It is currently estimated that Eris is 97.9% the size of Pluto. Not surprisingly, in 2006 Pluto was “demoted” by the IAU from planethood to dwarf planet status. (Is not a “dwarf planet” a planet? Confusing…)

My take on this is that Pluto should be considered a planet along with Eris, of course. The definition of “planet” is really rather arbitrary, so given that Pluto was discovered 75 years before Eris, and 62 years before TNO #2, I think we should (in deference to the memory of Mr. Tombaugh, mostly) define a planet as any non-satellite object orbiting the Sun that is around the size of Pluto or larger. So, by my definition, there are currently ten known planets in our solar system. Is that really too many to keep track of?

There is precedent for including history in scientific naming decisions. William Herschel (1738-1822) is thought to have coined the term “planetary nebula” in the 1780s, and though we now know they have nothing to do with planets (unless their morphology is affected by orbiting planets), we still use the term “planetary nebula” to describe them today.

In the table below, you will find the eight “classical” planets, plus the five largest TNOs, all listed in order of descending size. (The largest asteroid, Ceres, is 939 km across, and is thus smaller than the smallest of these TNOs.)

You’ll see that the next largest TNO after Eris is Haumea, and that its diameter is only 67% that of Eris.

I’ve also listed the largest satellite for each of these objects. Venus and Mercury do not have a satellite—at least not at the present time.

It is amazing to note that both Ganymede and Titan are larger than the planet Mercury! And Ganymede, Titan, the Moon, and Triton are all larger than Pluto.

Largest Objects in the Solar System

Object Diameter (km) Largest Satellite Diameter (km) Size Ratio
Jupiter 139,822 Ganymede 5,268 3.8%
Saturn 116,464 Titan 5,149 4.4%
Uranus 50,724 Titania 1,577 3.1%
Neptune 49,244 Triton 2,707 5.5%
Earth 12,742 Moon 3,475 27.3%
Venus 12,104 N/A N/A N/A
Mars 6,779 Phobos 23 0.3%
Mercury 4,879 N/A N/A N/A
Pluto 2,377 Charon 1,212 51.0%
Eris 2,326 Dysnomia 700 30.1%
Haumea 1,560 Hiʻiaka 320 20.5%
Makemake 1,430 S/2015 (136472) 175 12.2%
Gonggong 1,230 Xiangliu 200 16.3%

Should any other non-satellite objects with a diameter of at least 2,000 km be discovered in our solar system, I think we should call them planets, too.

Retrograde Asteroids and TNOs

Of the 793,918 asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) currently catalogued, only 98 are in retrograde orbits around the Sun. That’s just 0.01%.

By “retrograde” we mean that the object orbits the Sun in the opposite sense of all the major planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. From a vantage point above the north pole of the Earth, all of the major planets orbit in a counterclockwise direction around the Sun.

Source: https://community.dur.ac.uk/john.lucey/users/inner.html

But a retrograde object would be seen to orbit in a clockwise direction around the Sun, as is shown in the animation below for Jupiter retrograde co-orbital asteroid 514107 (2015 BZ509), with respect to Jupiter and its two “clouds” of trojan asteroids.

Source: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/asteroid-jupiters-orbit-goes-its-own-way

Of these 98 retrograde objects, only 14 have orbits well-enough determined to have received a minor planet number, and only one has yet received an official name (20461 Dioretsa).

Semimajor Axis (a) between…Number of Retrograde Minor Planets
Mars – Jupiter3
Jupiter – Saturn*20
Saturn – Uranus*15
Uranus – Neptune*20
TNOs40

*asteroids between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune are often referred to as centaurs

At least some of these objects may be captured interstellar objects.

Let’s now take a look at some of these 98 retrograde objects in greater detail.

20461 Dioretsa
The first retrograde asteroid to be discovered was 20461 Dioretsa, in 1999. The only named retrograde asteroid to date, Dioretsa is an anadrome of the word “asteroid”. It is a centaur in a highly eccentric orbit (0.90), ranging between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter out to beyond the orbit of Neptune. Objects in cometlike orbits that show no evidence of cometary activity are often referred to as damocloids. Dioretsa is both a centaur and a damocloid. Its orbital inclination (relative to the ecliptic) is 160°, which is a 20° tilt from an anti-ecliptic orbit. It takes nearly 117 years to orbit the Sun once. It is a dark object with a reflectivity only around 3% and is estimated to be about 9 miles across.

2010 EQ169
This retrograde asteroid holds the distinction (at least temporarily) of being the most highly-inclined main-belt asteroid (91.6°), relative to the ecliptic plane. It is also the retrograde asteroid with the smallest semimajor axis (2.05 AU) and lowest orbital eccentricity (0.10). Unfortunately, it was discovered after the fact by analyzing past data from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) space telescope, and has not been seen since. We have only a three-day arc of 17 astrometric observations of 2010 EQ169 between March 7-9, 2010 from which to determine its orbit. Nominally, 2010 EQ169 orbits the Sun at nearly a right angle to the ecliptic plane once every 2.9 years, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. However, our knowledge of its orbit is extremely uncertain, as shown below, and it has been lost. Our only hope will be to back-calculate the positions of future asteroids discovered to these dates to see if it matches the WISE positions.

ElementValue1σ Uncertainty
Inclination (i)91.606°18.177°
Semimajor Axis (a)2.0518 AU2.2176
Orbital Eccentricity (e)0.101530.90213
Orbital Period (P)2.94y4.765

2013 BL76
This retrograde TNO has the largest known semi-major axis of any of the retrograde non-cometary objects: 966.4274 ± 2.2149 AU. In a highly eccentric cometlike orbit (e = 0.99135), its perihelion is in the realm of the centaurs between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn (8.35 AU), and its aphelion is way out around 1,924 AU. It takes about 30,000 years to orbit the Sun. Its orbit is inclined 98.6° with respect to the ecliptic.

2013 LA2
This retrograde centaur is in an orbit closest to the ecliptic plane (i = 175.2°), tilted 4.8° with respect to the ecliptic. It orbits the Sun about once every 21 years between the orbits of Mars and Uranus.

2017 UX51
The distinction for this retrograde TNO is that it has the highest orbital eccentricity of any non-cometary solar system object (e = 0.9967). Or is it an old inactive comet? 2017 UX51 orbits the Sun every 7,419 ± 2,883 years as close in as between the orbits of Earth and Mars (perihelion q = 1.24 AU)—classifying it as an Amor object—out to far beyond the orbit of Neptune (aphelion Q = 759.54 ± 196.77 AU). Its orbital inclination is 108.2°.

343158 (2009 HC82)
An Apollo asteroid, 343158 is the only known retrograde near-Earth asteroid (NEA), with an orbital inclination of 154.4°. It orbits the Sun every 4.0 years, between 0.49 AU (almost as close in as the aphelion of Mercury) out to 4.57 AU (between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter).

References
Conover, E., 2017. Science News, 191, 9, 5.

JPL Small-Body Database Browser, https://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/sbdb.cgi, retrieved 31 March 2019.

Kankiewicz, P., Włodarczyk, I., 2018. Planetary and Space Science, 154, 72-76.

Minor Planet Center, https://minorplanetcenter.net/iau/MPCORB.html, retrieved 28 March 2019.

Namouni F., Morais M. H. M., 2018. MNRAS, 477, L117.

Wiegert, P., Connors, M., Veillet, C., 2017. Nature, 543, 687–689.

Jupiter at Quadrature

Wednesday evening, July 5, around 9:40:17 p.m. CDT, Jupiter reaches east quadrature, which means it is 90° east of the Sun.  In other words, the Sun-Earth-Jupiter line most nearly forms a right angle.

The best time to attempt daytime viewing of a superior planet like Jupiter is when it is at quadrature.  Then, we are looking at it through a region of the sky where reflected sunlight is most strongly polarized.  By using a polarizing filter with a telescope eyepiece, and properly rotating it, the sky background can be significantly darkened, allowing surprisingly good views of the planet during twilight and even daylight.

Jupiter reaches its most favorable viewing position when it crosses the celestial meridian, where it reaches its highest altitude, due south.  Wednesday evening, that occurs at 6:58:18 p.m. (Dodgeville) when the Sun is 16° above the horizon, 1h44m before sunset.  Use a polarizing filter for the best view of our solar system’s largest planet around this time on Wednesday, July 5—or the closest date that affords you clear skies.

Evening Planets

The most convenient time for most of us to observe the planets is in the early evening.  With that in mind, I’ve prepared an ephemeris of favorable evening times to view each of the eight major planets of the solar system over the next ten years.  Some interesting patterns emerge, which I will comment on.

With the exception of Mercury, what follows is a range of dates when each planet is at least 10° above the horizon at the end of evening twilight at latitude 43° N.  Mercury, however, is never even above the horizon at the end of evening twilight.

Mercury’s Maximum
Altitude at 43° N
Solar Depression
Angle
End of
Twilight
13°
Civil
12°
Nautical
below horizon
18°
Astronomical

Here is a list of dates when Mercury is highest above the western horizon at the end of evening civil twilight.

Mercury

Dates – Highest Above
Evening Horizon
Altitude
Constellation
July 18, 2017
Leo
November 28, 2017
Sgr
March 15, 2018
12°
Psc
July 2, 2018
Cnc
November 10, 2018
Oph
February 27, 2019
11°
Psc
June 16, 2019
10°
Gem
October 20, 2019
Lib
February 11, 2020
11°
Aqr
May 30, 2020
12°
Gem
September 25, 2020
Vir
January 25, 2021
10°
Cap
May 14, 2021
13°
Tau
September 2, 2021
Vir
January 9, 2022
Cap
April 28, 2022
13°
Tau
August 14, 2022
Leo
December 24, 2022
Sgr
April 11, 2023
13°
Ari
July 28, 2023
Leo
December 8, 2023
Sgr
March 24, 2024
12°
Psc
July 11, 2024
Cnc
November 20, 2024
Oph
March 8, 2025
12°
Psc
June 25, 2025
Cnc
November 1, 2025
Sco
February 20, 2026
11°
Psc
June 9, 2026
11°
Gem
October 10, 2026
Lib
February 4, 2027
11°
Aqr
May 24, 2027
13°
Tau
September 15, 2027
Vir

Mercury, the innermost planet, whips around the Sun every 88 days (116 days relative to the Earth—its synodic period).  It never strays more than 28° from the Sun.

As you can see in the graph below, Mercury is presently highest above our evening twilight horizon when it reaches greatest eastern elongation in April, and lowest in October.

Similarly, greatest eastern elongations that occur in the constellations Taurus and Aries present Mercury highest above our evening twilight horizon, and Libra, the lowest.

Now, let us turn to Venus.  Unlike Mercury, Venus usually spends a considerable number of days well above the horizon near greatest elongation.  This occurs because Venus orbits further from the Sun—reaching a maximum angular separation of 47°— and because its orbital period is only 140.6 days shorter than the Earth’s: the Earth “keeps up” with Venus reasonably well as the two planets orbit the Sun (the synodic period of Venus is 583.9 days), so it is a long time between successive elongations.  In the next ten years, we will see Venus high above the evening horizon during only three intervals, though for a generous three or four months each time.

Venus

Dates – At Least 10° Above the Horizon
at the End of Evening Twilight
Constellation
January 2, 2020 – May 7, 2020
Cap – Tau
February 26, 2023 – June 3, 2023
Cet – Cnc
November 30, 2024 – March 2, 2025
Sgr – Psc

Now, we turn to the superior planets: Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.  These planets are visible in our evening sky during and after opposition.

Mars has the longest synodic period of all the major planets—780 days—so it takes an unusually long period of time for the orbital positions of Mars and the Earth to change relative to one another.  Approximately every two years we get the opportunity to see Mars at least 10° above the horizon at the end of evening twilight.  The number of evenings Mars is visible varies quite a lot (due to its significant orbital eccentricity): 293 evenings during the 2018 perihelic opposition of Mars, down to 145 evenings during the aphelic opposition of Mars in 2027.  In any event, Mars spends a considerable amount of time during these intervals very far away from Earth and therefore disappointingly small in our telescopes.  The best time to observe Mars is during the early weeks of the intervals listed below when Mars is at or near opposition.

Mars

Dates – At Least 10° Above the Horizon
at the End of Evening Twilight
Constellation
July 21, 2018 – May 10, 2019
Cap – Tau
October 5, 2020 – May 27, 2021
Psc – Gem
November 28, 2022 – June 11, 2023
Tau – Cnc
January 7, 2025 – June 22, 2025
Cnc – Leo
February 12, 2027 – July 7, 2027
Leo – Vir

Jupiter orbits the Sun every 11.9 years, so it is easy to see why it is in a different constellation along the zodiac each year.

Jupiter

Dates – At Least 10° Above the Horizon
at the End of Evening Twilight
Constellation
March 30, 2017 – July 24, 2017
Vir
April 29, 2018 – August 29, 2018
Lib
May 28, 2019 – October 19, 2019
Oph
June 26, 2020 – December 10, 2020
Sgr
July 30, 2021 – January 22, 2022
Aqr
September 10, 2022 – March 1, 2023
Psc
October 21, 2023 – April 5, 2024
Ari
November 28, 2024 – May 5, 2025
Tau
January 1, 2026 – May 28, 2026
Gem
February 2, 2027 – June 16, 2027
Leo

The orbital periods of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are 29.5, 84.0, and 164.8 years, respectively, so we can see why they take a successively longer amount of time to traverse their circle of constellations.  You’ll also notice that the interval of visibility shifts later each year, but the shift is less with increasing orbital distance.  The synodic periods of Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune are 378.1, 369.7, and 367.5 days, respectively.

Saturn

Dates – At Least 10° Above the Horizon
at the End of Evening Twilight
Constellation
May 31, 2017 – October 25, 2017 Oph
June 10, 2018 – November 11, 2018 Sgr
June 20, 2019 – November 28, 2019 Sgr
June 30, 2020 – December 12, 2020 Cap – Sgr
July 12, 2021 – December 27, 2021 Cap
July 24, 2022 – January 9, 2023 Cap
August 7, 2023 – January 23, 2024 Aqr
August 21, 2024 – February 4, 2025 Aqr
September 5, 2025 – February 17, 2026 Psc
September 20, 2026 – March 2, 2027 Cet – Psc

Uranus

Dates – At Least 10° Above the Horizon
at the End of Evening Twilight
Constellation
October 2, 2017 – March 16, 2018
Psc
October 7, 2018 – March 20, 2019
Ari
October 12, 2019 – March 23, 2020
Ari
October 15, 2020 – March 27, 2021
Ari
October 20, 2021 – March 31, 2022
Ari
October 25, 2022 – April 4, 2023
Ari
October 30, 2023 – April 7, 2024
Ari
November 3, 2024 – April 12, 2025
Tau
November 8, 2025 – April 16, 2026
Tau
November 13, 2026 – April 20, 2027
Tau

Neptune

Dates – At Least 10° Above the Horizon
at the End of Evening Twilight
Constellation
August 13, 2017 – January 30, 2018
Aqr
August 16, 2018 – February 2, 2019
Aqr
August 19, 2019 – February 4, 2020
Aqr
August 21, 2020 – February 6, 2021
Aqr
August 24, 2021 – February 8, 2022
Aqr
August 27, 2022 – February 11, 2023
Aqr
August 30, 2023 – February 13, 2024
Psc
September 1, 2024 – February 15, 2025
Psc
September 4, 2025 – February 17, 2026
Psc
September 7, 2026 – February 17, 2027
Psc