Should they reclassify what is a "moon" ?

[iguana_tonante]

Q: What is a moon?
A: A solid object in orbit around a planet, dwarf planet, minor planet, or transneptunian object is called a "satellite." A natural satellite is sometimes referred to as a "moon" in popular usage. However, Earth's own satellite is called the "Moon" in both scientific and popular usage.

I think I already shown that they are called also "moons" in scientific usage, too.

Q: Why doesn't the Moon have a name?
A: The Moon does, of course, have a name - the Moon. It is known by many names in various languages - Luna (Latin, Spanish, Italian, and Russian), Mond (German), Lune (French), etc. Our moon was the first known moon. When we discovered that other planets had moons, they were given different names in order to distinguish them from our moon.

And see how the IAU, a scientific organization, use "moons" in their official communications.

I just like being difficult, pedantic, cranky, and crotchety. Is that so wrong?

Nothing wrong with being pedantic: I'm pedantic most of the time!

But being pedantic usually implies not being wrong.

 

[Pavonis]

The Earth's moon is called Moon in English (Luna in Italian, Selini in Greek, etc). A proper name extended to a category by virtue of being the first observed. Just like Earth's soil is called, well, earth.

But what do we call the soil on Mars? It's certainly not called "earth".

It's called regolith.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Regolith is on Earth too. It just means "blanket rock".

 

[scotpens]

But what do we call the soul on Mars? It's certainly not called “earth”.

I don't know about Mars, but Vulcans call it the katra.

There are many different brands of “soft facial tissue”. Virtually everyone in America calls all of them by the name, “kleenex”, yet only one brand of them is actually named “Kleenex”.

Not me. I call a tissue a tissue.

 

[PurpleBuddha]

^I have no reason to believe that TrekBBS represents a better educated cross section of our society.

While I'm the first to admit the low-end of the Bell Curve is well-represented here, I don't think you've spent enough time on the Internet. The level of discourse here is far above the median, probably around the 90th percentile if I had to take a wild guess.

Consider that the vast majority of netizens can't even string together a complete sentence, and communicate almost exclusively in txt-speak, and it's not hard to come to the conclusion that people here on TBBS are smarter than average.

Being Star Trek fans is likely tangential to the intelligence issue, though. We just got lucky, but I'm sure there is some kind of feedback loop involved where a community made up mostly of bright people will tend to attract other bright people--much like a community made up of drooling idiots tends to attract more of same.

TLDR

 

[Goliath]

I think it's actually a good question. Personally, I would favor a reclassification: there must be a line between "moon" and random rocks that got caught in orbit of a planet. My suggestion would be that a natural satellite should be classified as a "moon" if it has spherical shape due to auto-gravity.

Makes sense to me.

It would cause a bit of ruckus since it would exclude Phobos and Deimos (satellites of Mars) and many satellites of the outer planets, but it would be for the best in my opinion.

I doubt there would be too much ruckus. At least, not on anything like the scale of the ruckus over Pluto.

As for the name, an interesting suggestion could be "selenoid", along the lines of planetoid and asteroid (greek name plus -oid suffix), but I would be happy with just calling them "natural satellites". All moons are satellites, not all satellites are moons.

Those are both lucid, intelligent, and well-thought-out suggestions.

And for all those reasons, there is not a hope in hell of either being adopted.

My money is on "dwarf moon."

 

[Robert Maxwell]

^I have no reason to believe that TrekBBS represents a better educated cross section of our society.

While I'm the first to admit the low-end of the Bell Curve is well-represented here, I don't think you've spent enough time on the Internet. The level of discourse here is far above the median, probably around the 90th percentile if I had to take a wild guess.

Consider that the vast majority of netizens can't even string together a complete sentence, and communicate almost exclusively in txt-speak, and it's not hard to come to the conclusion that people here on TBBS are smarter than average.

Being Star Trek fans is likely tangential to the intelligence issue, though. We just got lucky, but I'm sure there is some kind of feedback loop involved where a community made up mostly of bright people will tend to attract other bright people--much like a community made up of drooling idiots tends to attract more of same.

TLDR

Your insightful contribution to this thread is greatly appreciated.

 

[iguana_tonante]

As for the name, an interesting suggestion could be "selenoid", along the lines of planetoid and asteroid (greek name plus -oid suffix), but I would be happy with just calling them "natural satellites". All moons are satellites, not all satellites are moons.

Those are both lucid, intelligent, and well-thought-out suggestions.

And for all those reasons, there is not a hope in hell of either being adopted.

My money is on "dwarf moon."

So true. The IAU, as any governing body, is bound much more by the laws of compromise than by those of common sense.

 

[Alidar Jarok]

I was just looking at THIS article, detailing one of Saturn's 60 known moons.

Daphnis is only 4.3 miles across.

Should they think about reclassifying what is or isn't a moon, like they did with what constitutes a planet?

I mean, any little rock they can see with a telescope or Cassini, or any other passing spacecraft shouldn't be considered a moon if Pluto isn't considered a planet.

I think it's actually a good question. Personally, I would favor a reclassification: there must be a line between "moon" and random rocks that got caught in orbit of a planet. My suggestion would be that a natural satellite should be classified as a "moon" if it has spherical shape due to auto-gravity. It would cause a bit of ruckus since it would exclude Phobos and Deimos (satellites of Mars) and many satellites of the outer planets, but it would be for the best in my opinion.

I feel removing Phobos and Deimos would cause far less controversy than removing Pluto, so it still might be for the best.

 

[David cgc]

And what about Pluto ? It isn't classified a planet any more so what does that make it's moon?

If I remember correctly, Charon is still classified as a natural satellite of Pluto, but they are more actually describes as a double system, since the barycenter of the system is located in the open space between them.

All the cool astronomical objects are in double systems.

(I just checked that, and, apparently, it depends on whether you think it's important that the barycenter is near the center of the larger object, or merely within it. Screw it. Trick-question-loving trivia geeks tell me that Earth/Moon is a double planet, and I believe them, because I like living on the the special planet. And if it weren't for that, there'd be nothing remarkable about Earth at all.)