Pluto's Craterless Plains Look Young

Institute for Creation Research ^ | Dec. 2015 | Brian Thomas

[Red Badger]

I remember reading someplace a looong time ago that eventually, millions of years, perhaps, Pluto and Neptune will either collide or Pluto will become a moon of Neptune...................

[Ken H]

Richard Hoagland will explain it all.

[SunkenCiv]

Never gonna happen, unless something happens with the orbit of either one. At one time R. S. Harrington and T. C. Van Flandern of USNO collaborated on a model in which Pluto was an escaped moon of Neptune. Harrington (d 1993) spent his later years searching for the 'real' Planet X; an earlier search had led to the discovery of Pluto by Clyde Tombaugh, and the high albedo of the planet (nyah nyah) was misleading when it came to calculating a probably diameter and mass. It is now known to be too small to have caused the flutter in the ephemeris of Neptune, and some doubt that the flutter was real, instead blaming (and tossing) some observations of Neptune. Van Flandern (d 2009) is better known for his independent development of the Exploding Planet Hypothesis (EPH) and somewhat for his dead-end dalliance with the false idea that the 'face on Mars' is artificial.

[fishtank]

Starlight and Time by Russell Humphreys.