This is

This is CBS High on the World. I'm John Bachelor. Hotel Mars episode N

David Livingston, my colleague and co-host and co-pilot of the space show Dr Space Himself and we're headed

to the dwarf planets series thanks to our PhD student in planetary geology also specializing in geophysics of icy bodies

Ian Pamela at Purdue University looking at series you will recall some years before there was

a NASA probe to series the mission was called Dawn the photographs coming back are

stark especially this great big crater in the middle of

Series looking like somebody gave it a sucker punch. But, Series itself is a revealing

part of our solar system. Ian's here to help us understand what

the news is about a muddy ocean.

Ian congratulations this is wonderful. Let us begin with definitions. How do you get to be a dwarf planet and reside in the asteroid belt? How did that happen? What's our guest? Good evening, Ian. Good evening.

So the official definition of why Series is a dwarf planet and not its own planet is because

there's a lot of other stuff in the asteroid belt

that series hasn't kind of taken up and made part of it.

Right?

If Earth was in the orbit of the asteroid belt,

it would have kind of gravitationally

pulled in all of the other stuff.

Series hasn't done that.

It's defined as a dwarf planet.

It's not big enough to kind of gravitationally grab everything around it.

So that's why it is a dwarf planet, but the reason why the

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