They're not as dangerous as throwing stars though...
2 new planets in solar system?
- Thread starter Melakon
- Start date
They're not as dangerous as throwing stars though...
So Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and Sedna mean nothing to you?
So Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and Sedna mean nothing to you?
Never heard of them.
So Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and Sedna mean nothing to you?At least Pluto will no longer be the only one in its category.
NASA has discussed the skiing potential of Humea, Makemake, Eris and Sedna?
So Haumea, Makemake, Eris, and Sedna mean nothing to you?At least Pluto will no longer be the only one in its category.
NASA has discussed the skiing potential of Humea, Makemake, Eris and Sedna?
Weren't these the other names of Redjack in Wolf in The Fold?
At least Pluto will no longer be the only one in its category.
It hasn't been since 2006. Or longer. The whole reason the definition of planets came up in the first place was because we discovered a bunch of other things in the same category as Pluto, one of which (Eris) was apparently even bigger than Pluto. We've known for over a decade that Pluto was a member of a much larger category, and the redefinition was the nomenclature finally catching up with the science.
And, again, these predicted objects are superterrestrial planets, bigger than Earth. They're not dwarf planets. So they're not in the same category as Pluto. If they exist, they're probably in a whole new category all their own, the first known super-Earths in the Solar System.
I seem to recall a name for two of those from the old Star Blazers cartoon (US dubbing of the Japanese anime Space Battleship Yamato). They had a Tenth Planet that had been destroyed called Minerva and a much farther out Eleventh Planet called Brumas. This was still back in the 1970s when Pluto was the Ninth Planet. In this 1974 show they had Pluto with a large moon. Charon wasn't discovered until 1978.
Arthur C. Clarke's The Awakening threw out the suggestion of twelve planets. Rescue Party cited an outer planet he called Persephone, though he didn't specify a number.
Imagine how Charon must feel, been demoted to a moon of something that isn't even a planet... I wonder if it still qualifies as a moon under these conditions.
For example, could a moon have moons?
Theoretically, yes, if it were close enough to be within the moon's Hill sphere, the radius within which the moon's gravity dominates over any other object's gravity. It's the same physics that lets moons orbit planets rather than the Sun, just on a smaller scale. There have been space probes that have orbited Earth's Moon for extended periods.
And I wish people would stop thinking Pluto was "demoted." On the contrary -- it went from being the last and least member of the planet category to the first and most prominent member of a huge new category of objects. It used to be an afterthought; now it's the harbinger of a whole new era of discovery. That's a step up, not down.
The problem is that laypeople tend to think that learning they were wrong about something is a bad thing, a failure. But to scientists, discovering you were wrong about something is exciting and awesome, because it's the beginning of a process of discovering new answers. Changing Pluto's status is a sign of progress, of a maturation of our understanding. That's not a negative.
They should make up their minds already!
This is a silly debate. Just say that dwarf planets are a category of planet, in the same way that dwarf stars are a kind of star, dwarf trees are a kind of tree, and so on. Saying "A dwarf planet is not a planet" is a contradiction in terms.
And for Pete's sake, resolve it so that people will stop obsessing over Pluto and ignoring all the other really, really cool and fascinating stuff that's going on in planetary science these days. Like the possible two new super-Earths that this thread was originally about.
And for Pete's sake, resolve it so that people will stop obsessing over Pluto and ignoring all the other really, really cool and fascinating stuff that's going on in planetary science these days. Like the possible two new super-Earths that this thread was originally about.
This is not what the article says.
What would really be great is if we had confirmation of life anywhere outside of Earth, even microscopic life. The first beings with no ancestry whatsoever in common with us!
Well, part of what's interesting about the subject is that we can't even assume that. If we did discover microbes on Mars or Enceladus, say, we couldn't necessarily rule out a common ancestry, since asteroid impacts would cause an exchange of debris between planets, and it is possible for certain species of bacteria to survive interplanetary transits. So any life we find elsewhere in the Solar System may well have the same origin as life on Earth -- in fact, I'd be surprised if it didn't. Even if we eventually find life on an extrasolar planet, there's a slim chance that interstellar panspermia could have occurred.
Although it would certainly be great to discover life that did have a separate origin. It'd be interesting to see what its genetic material was made of. If it used DNA, it would probably use different bases that followed a different code for producing proteins -- its own language, as it were. And it might use some other kind of nucleic acid, or some other complex molecule altogether.
There's an interesting detail, we've evolved from anaerobic to aerobic because oxygen that used to be a poison started to saturate our environment, the first known ecological disaster. It's likely that even if that extraterrestrial life had a common origin, it wouldn't have gone through the same radical selection. In fact it wouldn't be able to survive in our current environment.
Agree. What's needed is a better definition. Strictly speaking, Jupiter fails the given definition because it technically doesn't orbit the Sun; it and the Sun orbit about a center of mass(barycenter) that lies outside the Sun. Therefore, by that definition, not a planet.This is a silly debate. Just say that dwarf planets are a category of planet, in the same way that dwarf stars are a kind of star, dwarf trees are a kind of tree, and so on. Saying "A dwarf planet is not a planet" is a contradiction in terms.
No kidding! It's a wonderful time to be alive for anyone remotely interested in what's up!
Last edited:
You know there's something puzzling about Pluto and that is that the debate seems to be between it being it being a planet or a dwarf planet and that the way to decide that, is to see if there are debris on its orbit around the sun. That doesn't make much sense, in my opinion.
Similar threads
