… and it’s been doing it for long enough that it, and all the other plutinos, have settled into a 2:3 resonant orbit with Neptune, which takes 165 years to orbit the sun by itself.
Space is really big and the timescales are really long, in a way which doesn’t really make sense on human scales, except for things which are so fast that they also don’t make sense on human scales, like core-collapse supernovas.
The good news is that we’re good at doing maths and we’ve built some big computers to do that maths, so we’ve no problems ‘popping a few zeros’ into the sums that we do.
For the curious, Pluto takes 248 years to complete one lap around the Sun
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto
… and it’s been doing it for long enough that it, and all the other plutinos, have settled into a 2:3 resonant orbit with Neptune, which takes 165 years to orbit the sun by itself.
Space is really big and the timescales are really long, in a way which doesn’t really make sense on human scales, except for things which are so fast that they also don’t make sense on human scales, like core-collapse supernovas.
The good news is that we’re good at doing maths and we’ve built some big computers to do that maths, so we’ve no problems ‘popping a few zeros’ into the sums that we do.