A curious little story about a minor planet becoming something else landed in my email box yesterday. I’ve been working on a project about exoplanets for the past few weeks. Part of that involves looking into the formation of such systems around distant stars. Obviously, planets form, but other objects get formed when larger worlds do.

As part of the project, I read up on the kinds of worlds we have in our own solar system. Of course, we have planets. We also have dwarf planets (same as planets, but with a few qualifiers). There are minor planets, asteroids, comets, moons, and rings (made up of particles of broken-up moons). Oh, and we have a star, the Sun.

And Now We Have the Naming of Parts: Solar System Edition

Just because solar system objects get “binned” into various categories doesn’t mean they always STAY in those categories. And, those categories sometimes say more about our understanding of solar system objects than about the worlds themselves.

We all know about the IAU’s silliness of “demoting” Pluto (based on a vote by a remnant of astronomers at the end of a meeting). They didn’t even bother to consult planetary scientists, who have the best knowledge of planetary system objects. It’s still a planet, albeit termed a “dwarf planet”. But, the name we call it didn’t change Pluto. It’s still a fascinating world out in the Kuiper Belt and it still orbits the Sun and has activity under its surface. Nothing has changed there.

But, what if an object appears to have changed? Say, like a comet. It dives in toward the Sun, and as it gets close, its ices start to sublimate. That creates a cloud of material around the nucleus, called a coma. A pair of tails sprouts out from the comet, and they (and the coma) last until the nucleus gets too far away from the Sun to sublimate. In that sense, the comet DID change, from being just a frozen chunk of ice to being one that acts when heated to form more characteristics. But it’s still a comet, whether it’s in its active state or a quiescent phase. What also changes, as we learn more about how comets work, is our understanding of them.

Minor Planet Discovery

Now, what if a minor planet did the same thing as a comet? Does that change the minor planet designation? In the case of at least one object, it has done exactly that. It’s called Centaur 2014 OG392. This little worldlet orbits out between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune. Centaurs sometimes show features that comets usually exhibit: outgassing and coma-building. That’s pretty amazing since the region of space they orbit in pretty cold. That makes it harder for water to make the transition from a solid chunk of ice to a gas cloud.

A Minor Planet Becomes Something Else

Centaur 2014 OG392 caught the attention of a team of astronomers at Northern Arizona University, led by doctoral student and Presidential Fellow Colin Chandler. They studied it and found that this Centaur is pretty active. It’s outgassing and forming a coma. The team suspects that the culprit activity causing that outgassing is the sublimation of carbon dioxide or ammonia (or both). The team measured a coma that stretches out about 400,000 kilometers from the body of the minor planet.

Well, so does that coma formation make Centaur 2014 OG392 an active minor planet or a comet? Apparently, there are other active minor planets, so that’s an interesting question. The Minor Planet Center, which has the task of cataloging such objects, has responded to the discovery of the coma around Centaur 2014 OG392 by designating it as a comet. So, it’s new name is now C/2014 OG392 (PANSTARRS). And, that’s perfectly appropriate. It now reflects a better understanding of what this object really is.

Change is Good, Even for Minor Planets

I think this is all very interesting, and really reflects very nicely on our growing awareness of objects and activities in the solar system. It also shows how, as time goes by and new equipment and observing methods become available, our understanding of solar system objects is what changes. Comets and planets and asteroids and other objects will continue to do what they do, regardless of what we call them. But, the names we call them need to accurately reflect our understanding of them — not rely on outdated naming methods and misguided votes.

The year 2020 has been a time of destructive wildfires around the world. The same happened last year. And, over the past decades, the fires have been become more frequent around the planet, as well as more deadly. At the same time, Earth is undergoing climate change. Now, correlation doesn’t necessarily mean causation in science. However, in this case, there’s a direct link between climate change and the rise of destructive fires.

Average global temperatures are rising, which means that spring and summer temperatures are higher. For regions where snowpack supplies water, this means that melt happens earlier. Soils dry out sooner, and inevitably, we get drought. This is certainly true where I live, in the Western United States. But, it has also happened in Australia, Europe, and parts of South America, and Asia. It’s part of climate change.

I’ve talked about climate change here before. Why? Because it’s part of studying our planet as a planet. We study Mars and Venus and the others and characterize their surfaces and atmospheres. Our space and weather agencies do the same for Earth. Unfortunately for us, the data about our planet also contains damning evidence that we’re hurting the planet we live on. There is no Planet B.

How Are Wildfires and Climate Change Connected?

When regions dry out, trees and shrubs are stressed early. This makes them susceptible to insect infestations (particularly pine beetles in parts of the U.S.) and disease. Those, in turn, weaken the plants and trees. They become tinder, waiting for the next lightning strike, a careless smoker or a hiker building a fire in a fragile area, a downed power line in a windstorm; basically anything that can spark a fire. Once the flames start, they are fed by the tinderbox conditions. If the winds are blowing, that hurries the fire across huge sections of landscape in very short order.

The onset of climate change has made it easier for more and larger wildfires to occur. In Australia, huge fires devastated large swaths of the continent, and it’s likely they’ll happen again. Here in the Western U.S., where we face exceptionally dry conditions through much of the year, the likelihood of fires increases each year. Forests are destroyed, homes lost, wildlife affected, and the costs of fighting the fires go up. The science is pretty clear about climate change. We can chart its effects and costs.

We know what has caused our climate to change: increasing greenhouse gases in our atmosphere that trap heat. Where do the gases come from? We all know this, too: human activities using fossil fuels for transport, electrical generation, and other activities, are a large part of the problem. I know that doesn’t sit well with a lot of folks who depend on fossil fuels for transportation, heating, cooking, and as a way to make money. I’m one of them. But, it doesn’t change the basic science. You pump enough greenhouse gases into an atmosphere, and that is going to affect the long-term climate. We’ve been doing that for more than a century, and the changes are documentable and measurable. And, now we are facing increasing wildfire dangers.

Climate Change, Fires, and Your Health

These fires put out a lot of smoke, in addition to the destruction they cause. Those of us who experience the secondhand effects of fires can tell you that breathing in smoke for weeks at a time is not a good thing. The smoke from the fires contains a number of pollutants, particulates, and ash. Some of that stuff comes from the vegetation that is burned. But, anyone who’s watched a fire burn through buildings knows that puts other materials into the smoke as well.

I remember watching several homes go up in a fire north of us some years ago; smoke from trees is generally white in color. When a home goes up, the smoke turns dark and heavy. It’s an incredibly sad sight because you know that someone’s home and treasures are going, going, gone. In fact, I have a colleague who lost everything to a fire in Oregon; he and his wife barely had minutes to get out of their home before it went up in flames. The same happened with the fires near my home this past weekend. Families are homeless, businesses ruined, landscapes torched.

During the recent fires, many of us in the affected regions have seen ashfall from fires. It’s not the best thing to be breathing into our lungs, just as pollution in cities isn’t good for the people who live in them. Beyond the obvious smoke pollution, however, is the carbon dioxide that fires pump into an already-stressed atmosphere. In addition, after a fire chews its way through a landscape, that burned area is going to be much more susceptible to flooding and mudslides when it does rain or snow. So, wildfires pose a risk to life and landscapes in several ways. And, as climate change intensifies, we’ll see more of this kind of activity. It’s not going to be a fun ride.

Climate Science is Fact-based

Everything I’ve written here is fact-based, science-based knowledge. If you live in a fire-prone area, you are already familiar with this. Of course, if you live in a city overridden with pollutants, you also know about the effects of breathing effluent. If you don’t, please take the word of climate scientists who measure the changes and do the science. Also, believe your fellow humans who have to live with this. It’s time to make some fundamental changes in the way we treat our planet. We’ve known this for years. But now, we have to OWN that knowledge and make some changes that benefit all life on this planet.

It’s interesting to think about this: if we saw this happening on another planet, or if we saw the people in a neighboring townn doing something that endangered our own lives and livelihoods, we’d speak up. We’d document it, wouldn’t we? Well, it’s a little tougher to do since we’re ON the planet that we’re changing. It’s too easy to just not do anything. And, during a time of pandemic (and spread of disease is another side-effect of climate change), it’s really tough to get out there and make changes. It’s easier (and safer, right now) to stay home. And, guess what? When populations DID stay home, their air quality got better. Their environment changed. So, it’s possible to make changes by switching up how we generate power, how we transport ourselves, and how we do things to avoid pumping “stuff” into the atmosphere.

Part of that includes rethinking our forest management practices to reduce the possibility of future wildfires. The U.S. government is responsible for most forested land in the country. For many years, the idea has been to avoid cutting trees in our forests, for example. It’s actually just fine to thin out the dead and dying trees and underbrush. That’s certainly the advice most of us who live near forests follow for our own properties. It’s called “mitigation”. It won’t stop fires from happening, but it may reduce the severity of those that do occur.

More Info on Climate Change and Fires

This is a planet we live on. It’s like Mars or Venus, in that it has certain characteristics we want to study. Unlike those two, however, our planet is alive and beautiful and still supports a huge variety of life. Climate change is our planet’s response to what we, as humans, have done to it through our activities. People may not like to hear that, but it’s true.

Don’t take just MY word for it. There are some excellent sources of info out there from scientists who DO know what they’re talking about. Here’s a selected list of reputable sources.

European Space Agency Climate Office The European Space Agency studies Earth from space to understand our planet.

Climate Reality Project An action group dedicated to public education about climate change.

NASA studies our planet from space to understand its systems.

NOAA’s climate pages NOAA has tracked the effects of climate change for decades.

UN Climate change page

Yale Climate Connections A non-partisan information service providing information about climate change.