http://www.newscientist.com/article...after-all.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news
I never quit calling it a planet.
I never quit calling it a planet.
Is Pluto a planet after all?
- Thread starter msbae
- Start date
The Blago scandal wasn't enough, let's waste time debating this.
^ Similar to Jupiter's moons. Anything bigger than a cinder block seems to qualify.
All Seeing Eye
Admiral
Oh for goodness sake. Pluto is still a planet because it's a dwarf planet. What the fuck does it matter whether the term dwarf is added to it?
Pluto is a very tiny planet and is therefore a dwarf planet yet still a fricking planet regardless.
Pluto is a very tiny planet and is therefore a dwarf planet yet still a fricking planet regardless.
Are the asteroids in question as large as, or larger than, Pluto? If so, I would be happy to call them planets, even if there are scores of them.
I suspect this is the case. Ceres is apparently classified as a dwarf planet too.
Some of them are. But, more importantly, what makes Pluto the arbiter of the size to be a planet?
We could theoretically have thousands of planets in our solar system if Sykes gets his way. If it wasn't for the theoretical planet X, Pluto probably wouldn't even have been classified as a planet.
I remember reading the list of qualifications drawn up for planetary status a few years ago and thinking they were so ridiculously detailed that they would probably have to be altered repeatedly as we discovered more about the planets orbiting other systems. As far as I'm concerned, the logical way to define a planet is to pick a specific size or mass and just say "Anything this big or larger is a planet and anything smaller is an asteroid or comet. Period." If a planet happens to be a Kuiper Belt object, fine, that makes it a Kuiper Belt planet.
If we have to draw the line somewhere, we might as well draw it there, since we are accustomed to thinking of Pluto as a planet anyway.
Before too long, we'll only have four real planets in our solar system with the rest considered either gaseous or asteroidal formations.
What's in a name???
What's in a name???
Oh for crying out loud... is it almost spherical and in orbit around the sun, as apposed to another body? That definition can exclude both asteroids and satellites, ditching all this slide-rule hair-splitting.
If the moon ever broke away from the Earth's pull, I'd be in favour of reclassifying it as the 4th planet from the sun. But it hasn't and nor would I likely survive such a disaster if it did.
If the moon ever broke away from the Earth's pull, I'd be in favour of reclassifying it as the 4th planet from the sun. But it hasn't and nor would I likely survive such a disaster if it did.
There are three basic criteria for planethood, and you've listed two of them. Pluto, Eris, Sedna, Quaoar, and thousands of roundish Kuiper Belt objects and asteroids would be planets by your two terms.
Fortunately, Pluto and its sisters fail to live up to the third category-- they are not the dominant gravitational body in their neighborhood. Adding in that third criteria cuts out all the Kuiper crap and leaves us with a nice manageable quantity of planets.
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If there were less politics involved in the definition and we had a better idea of all of the details of planetary formation, we could come up with a better one.
does it orbit the sun or does it have a barycentre orbiting the sun? is it spherical or mostly spherical? is it over X mass where X = Pluto's mass?
if it answers all three of those, in my book it's a planet and i don't give a rat's ass about dawrf planets or the IAU.
and that would include Charon as being Pluto's twin.
if it answers all three of those, in my book it's a planet and i don't give a rat's ass about dawrf planets or the IAU.
and that would include Charon as being Pluto's twin.
Does anyone know where I can find a map of the solar system that has all the planet bodies in their respective orbits. I looked on wiki, but I can't seem to find one with all the dwarf and main planets with their orbits shown.
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