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IVAN ANDREE VICTORIA VARGAS
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ghly the mass of Earth, with further calculations in 1948 bringing the mass down to

roughly that of Mars.[46][48] In 1976, Dale Cruikshank, Carl Pilcher and David
Morrison of the University of Hawaiʻi calculated Pluto's albedo for the first time,
finding that it matched that for methane ice; this meant Pluto had to be
exceptionally luminous for its size and therefore could not be more than 1 percent
the mass of Earth.[49] (Pluto's albedo is 1.4–1.9 times that of Earth.[3])

In 1978, the discovery of Pluto's moon Charon allowed the measurement of Pluto's
mass for the first time: roughly 0.2% that of Earth, and far too small to account
for the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus. Subsequent searches for an
alternative Planet X, notably by Robert Sutton Harrington,[52] failed. In 1992,
Myles Standish used data from Voyager 2's flyby of Neptune in 1989, which had
revised the estimates of Neptune's mass downward by 0.5%—an amount comparable to
the mass of Mars—to recalculate its gravitational effect on Uranus. With the new
figures added in, the discrepancies, and with them the need for a Planet X,
vanished.[53] As of 2000 the majority of scientists agree that Planet X, as Lowell
defined it, does not exist.[54] Lowell had made a prediction of Planet X's orbit
and position in 1915 that was fairly close to Pluto's actual orbit and its position
at that time; Ernest W. Brown concluded soon after Pluto's discovery that this was
a coincidence.[55]
Classification
Further information: Definition of planet

From 1992 onward, many bodies were discovered orbiting in the same volume as Pluto,
showing that Pluto is part of a population of objects called the Kuiper belt. This
made its official status as a planet controversial, with many questioning whether
Pluto should be considered together with or separately from its surrounding
population. Museum and planetarium directors occasionally created controversy by
omitting Pluto from planetary models of the Solar System. In February 2000 the
Hayden Planetarium in New York City displayed a Solar System model of only eight
planets, which made headlines almost a year later.[56]

Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta lost their planet status among most astronomers after
the discovery of many other asteroids in the 1840s. On the other hand, planetary
geologists often regarded Ceres, and less often Pallas and Vesta, as being
different from smaller asteroids because they were large enough to have undergone
geological evolution.[57] Although the first Kuiper belt objects discovered were
quite small, objects increasingly closer in size to Pluto were soon discovered,
some large enough (like Pluto itself) to satisfy geological but not dynamical ideas
of planethood.[58] On July 29, 2005, the debate became unavoidable when astronomers
at Caltech announced the discovery of a new trans-Neptunian object, Eris, which was
substantially more massive than Pluto and the most massive object discovered in the
Solar System since Triton in 1846. Its discoverers and the press initially called
it the tenth planet, although there was no official consensus at the time on
whether to call it a planet.[59] Others in the astronomical community considered
the discovery the strongest argument for reclassifying Pluto as a minor planet.[60]
IAU classification

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