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If a Ninth Planet is discovered in the Outer Solar System, should it be called Hercules?

What Roman deity would you choose?

  • Total voters
    29
Oddish said:
So if I choose to disagree with you, I'm stupid. You fire insults at me, and you ACTUALLY expect me to adopt your opinion because of it. How utterly pathetic.
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Grendelsbayne is being a bit harsh maybe but this isn't his\her opinion we're talking about, but rather a scientific definition. Which has changed, and may do so again in the future as we accumulate more knowledge.

After all, "planet" used to just mean a light in the sky that moved against the fixed background of the other lights, back before we had any comprehension of what these objects were.
 
Ceres was originally classified as a planet when first discovered. They finally chose to put it in a new category.

If we reinstate Pluto, then someone should justify why we shouldn't also reinstate Ceres.
 
There are three other "dwarf planets" as well. It was probably considered more convenient to delete one planet from "the list" than to add four.
 
Are you worried that by it being classified as a "dwarf" planet, that new designation will reduce the odds of additional probes launched to that celestial body? If anything, I suspect the discoveries made by the last probe should increase the odds...whatever the bleedin' thing is called in some textbook.
 
unless you bought real estate on Pluto and are worried about it getting devalued, who cares what it's defined as? I was fine with the definition essentially being any spherical body orbiting the sun that was not a moon. That would have defined Ceres, Pluto, Eris, Sedna, etc as planets. If the worry had been about children having to memorize them, they could have stuck to the non-dwarfs. It doesn't really matter, either way.
 
I don't worry about anything. I just prefer the idea of having our solar system's outermost limit be a desolate hunk of frozen rock 7 billion kicks away than a ball of bright blue soup at a mere 4.5 billion.
 
Yeah, who's defining that as our outermost limit? Beyond the ball of bright blue soup you've got the Kuiper Belt, which contains MANY hunks of frozen rock (some of which may be larger than others), and then the Oort Cloud.

I didn't learn it that way in school 40 years ago either. But if those things are there, then they're part of the definition.
 
How about calling a new planet Pax? It'd be Latin and therefore fit in with the others. And since with Mars we have a planet dedicated to the god of war, and with so much quarrellling and wars going on on Terra, it's about time to get some peace into this solar system.
Or Spes ( = hope).
 
rhubarbodendron said:
How about calling a new planet Pax? It'd be Latin and therefore fit in with the others. And since with Mars we have a planet dedicated to the god of war, and with so much quarrellling and wars going on on Terra, it's about time to get some peace into this solar system.
Or Spes ( = hope).
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Or just call it Pax Magellanis
 
I'm not exactly a fan of the Bobiverse.
I'd gladly second any Andromedish name as long as it's not Nietzsche. It's not surprising that a guy who wrote "if you go to a woman, don't forget to bring a whip" ended up in a loonie asylum.
 
I think it's more the Bluth-verse. Same place where we got the American Tail series, the Secret of NIMH, and Dragon's Lair.
 
Going back to new planet names, "Tehom" is my new suggestion - it's the original Hebrew name for the watery chaos in Genesis, and is related to "Tiamat" (hopefully this will kill off Zecharia Sitchin's rubbish that many people believe in). It's also close to the Biblical Hades (Sheol) and the name fits the current IAU rules for trans-Neptunian object names.

We can even name its major moons Eos (the Greek dawn goddess), Theia (Greek Titan goddess of light; I don't believe in the giant-impact hypothesis anymore), and Erebus (Greek god of darkness), as the first thing Yahweh made out of Tehom (on the first day of creation) were the light and thus day and the darkness and thus night.

Luna + Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Tehom
 
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