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NASA chief calls for Pluto to be reinstated as a planet

2026-05-01 17:37:21Lifestyle SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
NASA chief calls for Pluto to be reinstated as a planet
Pluto

It's been exactly 20 years since Pluto was kicked out of the planet club, but it seems some still refuse to accept this demotion.

Jared Isaacman, the billionaire friend of Elon Musk who was recently appointed NASA administrator, declared in Congress on Thursday that Pluto should be returned to the list of planets.

He added that NASA is “working on several publications in order to mobilize the scientific community and reconsider the issue.” It is not clear which publications he was referring to.

Pluto was discovered in 1930 by American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh and for 76 years held the title of the ninth and most distant planet in the Solar System.

The picture began to change in the 2000s, when several other bodies of similar size were discovered, such as Eris, which is located further from the Sun and has a greater mass than Pluto.

If Pluto were to be considered a planet, then the same should apply to other distant worlds. After a heated debate, the International Astronomical Union changed the definition of planets in 2006 by establishing three criteria.

For a body to be considered a planet, it must have enough mass to assume a spherical shape. It must also orbit the Sun and have cleared its orbit of smaller bodies like asteroids.

Pluto meets the first two criteria, but not the third. Thus, it was reclassified into the dwarf planet category, which also includes Eris, Ceres, Makemake, and Haumea.

This new definition remains controversial, as some astronomers believe that planets should be defined by their internal properties and not by the presence of other bodies in the same orbit.

In an interview given in March to the Daily Mail, Isaacman spoke in favor of returning Pluto to the category of planets.

The NASA administrator returned to the topic again on Thursday, when he answered a question from a House committee that is reviewing the Trump administration's NASA budget proposal.

Some astronomers were concerned by the fact that Isaacman, on the one hand, defends Pluto, while on the other hand supports the government's proposal to halve the budget.

"The question of whether we should call Pluto a planet distracts from the real scientific issues," Amanda Hendrix of the Planetary Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, told Nature.

"It's crazy to 'make Pluto a planet again' while destroying the careers of the scientists who study it," planetary scientist Adina Denton wrote in Blue Sky.


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