Pluto May Actually Be A ‘Giant Comet,’ New Study Suggests

Comets, by definition, are leftovers from the formation of planets and moons; little crumbs that didn't have the opportunity to clump together into larger objects. Thus, I doubt the validity of that researcher's findings. The similarity in nitrogen composition could be a coincidence, or simply determined by the part of the Solar System Pluto is in (there's plenty of icy nitrogen around there). Besides, the researcher only looked at the nitrogen in Pluto's glacier, not at Pluto's internal composition throughout.

There's simply no gravitational reason for billions of comets to come together and clump like that.

originally posted by: DictionaryOfExcuses
a reply to: DexterRiley

Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Collab!!!!!

Might be an interesting plot for a short story: Pluto as an intelligent entity made up of a hive mind of sentient comets, overseeing and protecting the solar system from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

I don't think that quite rises to the level of a blockbuster movie. But it sounds like a perfect plot for one of those campy SciFi channel movies.


-dex

originally posted by: wildespace

There's simply no gravitational reason for billions of comets to come together and clump like that.

What's the gravitational reason for billions/trillions of rocks and asteroids coming together to form Earth?

The inner planets formed where it was warmer. The volatile materials (water, methane, etc) that formed the pre-solar system nebula would not easily survive the inner warmth once the Sun lit up, so the materials that began clumpging together there was mostly rocky materials (asteroids), and those mostly rocky asteroids were the raw materials that gravitationally came together to be the major component of the formation of the inner planets.

The volitile materials of the outer reaches of the nebula from which our solar system formed could still survive the emergence of the Sun, and the warmth that came with it, because of their distance from the sun. Those volatile and icy gasses, along with the rocky materials also present in the outer proto-planetary system, formed the icy comets that are prevalent in the outer solar system rather than forming mostly-rocky asteroids...

...And it was those icy comets and other raw materials that may have come together through gravity to form larger icy kuiper belt objects, just like the more rocky raw materials of the inner solar system gravitationally came together to form the inner planets.

By the way, the gas giants of the outer solar system also formed beyond that "frost line" where the volatile gasses that formed together to make those gas giants could still be present. It is the leftover materials -- the rocky asteroids left in the inner solar system and the icy stuff left in the Kuiper belt and beyond -- that formed the rest of the solar system.

originally posted by: Soylent Green Is People

originally posted by: wildespace

There's simply no gravitational reason for billions of comets to come together and clump like that.

What's the gravitational reason for billions/trillions of rocks and asteroids coming together to form Earth?

Smaller bits gradually stuck together into bigger bits, those bigger bits gradually stuck together into even bigger bits, and so forth.

Pluto, while sharing its surroundings with Keiper belt comets, is thought to consist of 70 percent rock and 30 percent water ice. It's thought to have a rocky core that takes up 70% of the dwarf planet's diameter. www.space.com...

There's at least one paper speculating that Pluto might have an iron core. arxiv.org...