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Definition of Planet to be Announced in September

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the bigger-than-a-breadbox dept.

MasaMuneCyrus writes "After over seven years of debating, the International Astronomical Union announced that it expects to announce the official definition of a planet in September. After many-a-deadlock, they handed the task of deciding exactly what a planet is to a new committee, which includes historians and educators. 'They wanted a different perspective from that of planetary scientists,' said Edward Bowell, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who is also vice president of the IAU's Division III-Planetary Systems Sciences group. If all goes according to plan, the wording will be proposed in their 12-day General Assembly meeting in Prague."

4 of 200 comments (clear)

  1. In October... by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... debian-legal will notice that Earth is not a planet under the new definition.

    --
    http://outcampaign.org/
  2. Will they finally discount pluto? by Shrithe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I hope Pluto finally gets excluded from planet definition. It's too small (only twice the size as it's "moon", Charon, and a little less than a fifth as massive as Luna), it's out of the plane of the elliptic (a trait shared with objects like comets, but not any planets), and it's not even orbiting in a stable configuration with regard to Neptune (for part of it's orbit, Pluto is in fact eighth, and Neptune ninth).

    Then there's the fact that it only really got counted as a planet in the first place because astronomers at the time of it's discovery were hung up on the idea of discovering a ninth planet. They thought they found a disturbance in Neptune's orbit, which they attributed to a ninth planet, but ended up being caused by the fact that they were working from bad data about Neptune's mass. Pluto's much too small to have any effect on Neptune's orbit.

    This might finally put the final nail in the coffin of the idea of nine major planets in our solar system. We can only hope.

  3. Any definition is arbitrary by Frans+Faase · · Score: 5, Insightful
    As there are so many parameters that a celestrical body can have, any definition of what is a planet and what is not, is highly arbitrary and thus unscientific and based on emotional considerations. And because of this, there will always be large groups of people who will reject any such definition. Especially, because it will all be wheter Pluto should be called a planet or not.

    I think the most logical thing would be to consider "planet" a part of the name of a celestrical body, just like we do with "ocean" and "sea", and not use it as a classification word.

  4. Re:Tangible? by Shrithe · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of proof in science. We've observed those planets about as well as we've observed many subatomic particles. Entities are posited to fit the observation. This is the case in any area of science. Not counting possible margins of error in measurements, we've observed these planets in much the same way as we observe subatomic particles. Would you like to stop believing in those?

    If you would, would mind explaining exactly how all our predictions based on those particles ended up being right? Lucky guesses, the lot of them?

    That's an awfully big leap of faith.

    Your comparison, by the way, entirely fails to hold water. The issue here is a historical mistake having been entrenched in the popular definition, and the lack of a technical definition. IUPAC doesn't have to deal with popular definitions confusing the issue, they're already developed technical definitions for anything within their scope.