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Geologists Angry About New 'Pluton' Definition
An anonymous reader writes "According to a story over at Nature, some geologists are ticked off at the International Astronomical Union for using the word 'pluton' to describe a round object orbiting the sun with a period more than 200 years. A pluton, it seems, is a common type of rock formation that exists in most Geology 101 curricula. IAU head Owen Gingerich is quoted as saying that he was only peripherally aware of the definition, and because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important."
Skipping for the moment implications of inadequacy on the part of both MS and this scientist, clearly there is a problem when people base their work on expectations of intellectual integrity on the part of corporate IT products like this, especially those not easily accessible by reviewers. There is a Japanese character dictionary built into Windows too but I have no idea how a reviewer could grade it against commonly used print versions.
Besides, geology seems to be one of the most highly leveraged sciences in planetary studies, if you consider most of what the Mars robots were doing was geology. For a planetary scientists to miss this is bizarre.
and from TFA, it appears their intention was to ensure whatever word they used didn't already have significant meaning in popular culture.
Angstrom, Joule, Candella.
They don't have "significant meaning in popular culture" either, but you would not go around redefining those words, would you?
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
and even if we didn't use those definitions for what a "planet" was, it doesn't matter:
because whatever word we agree that would be this earthlike range of parameters of size/ atmosphere/ etc... say this word was "fred", then this word would rapidly become the most interesting word in use when talking about extrasolar systems
say we found 10 new systems
and we classified each according to our current definitions: gas giants, planets, moons, etc. the first thing everyone would want to know is where the "fred"s were: the bodies most like earth. the gas giants, planets, moons: who cares
"ok, this system has 20 planets, 3 gas giants, and 45 moons"
"whatever, where are the freds?"
"well, the freds, the most earthlike orbs, are: 4 orbitting the star, 2 orbitting the first gas giant, and one orbitting the third gas giant"
"ok, that's what i'll be researching"
the "fred"s are the most important things: the things that might harbor alien life, or be targets of our colonization.
and so in the future, whether we use the word "planet" or some other word to describe the most earthlike worlds, whatever word that is used will come to have the most meaning to us, and all other classifications will fall into more esoteric and archaic meanings, so that in a future of many known extrasolar systems, our current defintion of planets and moons will be looked down as ancient and archaic and useless
kind of like how modern chemists look at the quaint classifications of alchemists "earth/ air/ fire/ water", or how modern astronomers look at the whimsical classifications of astrologers ("libra", "virgo", "aries")
so will future astronomers look down on our current understanding of planets and moons and its basically useless emphasis on "what it orbits" as being more important than "what it is made of"
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I don't see the need for picking a more or less random word. Pluto is still going to be described as a kind of planet. The term 'pluton' (presumably meaning something like "Pluto-like-planet") is not scientific - we should use a term that has meaning and not something that means "this is kinda sorta like that".
Picking a term that's also used in geology was a terrible misstep - when geologists finally get out to these smaller planets, they are going to get horribly confused. Is the rock a Pluton - or is it FROM a Pluton - or is that a typo and it's actually from Pluto? Yuk, yuk, yuk! If you have to make up a word - especially a word that's still going to be used a thousand years from now - at least think through the consequences *carefully*.
The term "Dwarf Planet" seems entirely suitable here. It indicates that it is a kind of planet (which is reasonable given that it's round and orbits a star) - and it tells you something useful about it (it's evidently smaller than you might expect a typical planet to be) - and it has strong similarities with "Dwarf Star" which is a nice thing. We could then apply a kind of uniform taxonomy to those kinds of things - yielding "Dwarf Moon" for those teeny-tiny (but round) moons out there. All nice and uniform, neat and scientific.
If we got really elegant about this, we could talk about a "Dwarf X" (where X is a star, planet, moon or other body) as being an object that's in the lower tenth percentile of the size range for objects of class "X" (or twentieth percentile - or whatever makes that work). Terms like 'Red Giant' for stars and 'Gas Giant' for planets are already set up kinda like that. By implication then, our moon would be a Giant Moon or something like that since I guess it's the largest moon we know of right now.
If the astronomers don't get this 100% right this time, they are only going to have to do it all over again in another 10 years. We're already in trouble over free-floating "planets" that don't orbit stars and things that are borderline between stars and planets (Brown Dwarf Stars for example). We're also in danger of finding tiny stars that orbit humungous stars such that their barycenter lies within the diameter of the bigger star - and we could end up having to call those things planets!
We also could find moons that have their own moons - and 'double-moons' that co-orbit each other whilst together going around a common planet (actually - I think we already have some of those around Saturn).
www.sjbaker.org
I'd agree. The only objections I've see to terrestrial planets, gas giants, and Pluto as a Kuyper Belt Object was from a children's letter-writing campaign. We are way to fixated on our children when we change a workable scientific nomenclature so some random six year old, who won't remember a think about it at twenty, like as not, gets a smile.
We're going to be reworking this system anyway in a few years, as more extrasolar planets are discovered. You already see references to 'hot Jupiters' and such in the popular and semitechnical press. We should have just demoted Pluto, lived with a few subspecies of asteroids, and waited 'till we had more knowledge of other systems.
What we now have is just stupid. We're going to end up with a couple of hundred planets, of such diversity that the term will convey no information.
The IAU is going to be hideously embarrassed about the whole sorry episode, at some point. They may as well get started now.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.