If you want Pluto to be a planet again, watch this... #shorts

Look, I love Pluto as much as the next person, but you can’t harp on about Pluto being a planet and forget about Eris, Haumea, Makemake, Gonggong, Quaoar, Ceres, Orcus and Sedna, aka the other dwarf planets of the solar system. Because yes, there’s 3 conditions that you have to pass to be a planet, first you have to be orbiting the Sun (so that rules out all the moons in the solar system, some of which are bigger than Pluto including our own Moon), second you have to be big enough that gravity is strong enough to round you out and stop you looking like a potato (which rules out all the asteroids and comets), and then you have to be gravitationally dominant, so you have to have cleared your orbit around the Sun of anything else comparable in size. This is the hurdle that Pluto and all the other dwarf planets fall at, in if Pluto could also technically be classed as a binary planet, because its Moon Charon is half the width of Pluto and the two orbit a point in between them. So I know this has been in the news a lot lately, and making the rounds on social media, but please if you’re going to argue for Pluto, you can’t leave out the rest of the dwarfs! Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: [email protected] Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst --- 📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): http://lnk.to/DrBecky --- 👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): https://dr-becky.teemill.com/ --- 🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive --- 🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video! --- 👩🏽‍💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars. http://drbecky.uk.com