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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."
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.
In other news, the US Congress voted not to move to Linux, after Senator Binghaman discovered that MS Word's spell checker doesn't recognize it.
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A word with more than one meaning? The horror!
Life's EULA: shit happens.
This is far from the first time that a term has been overloaded. It happens all the time across fields, sometimes even within (I'm looking at you computer science).
There's nothing worse than when rock geeks, and rocks in space geeks get into argument over vocabulary. ;)
Error 407 - No creative sig found
1. n. some rock thingy that noone* cares about.
2. n. some astromomical thingy that nooone* cares about.
* by weight, not intellectual capacity.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Today, the UFC brings you: Scientist Cage Match! My money's on the geologists. Despite their tendencies towards excessive beer consumption, at least they run around outdoors occasionally.
Geologist goes postal against Ballmer, fights back, actually throwing his chair at him (oh the irony) for not including the world pluton in the ms word spellcheck.
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Plutrino
Plutonite
Mini-Pluto
iPluto Nano
Context should be sufficient to tell what kind of 'pluton' is being discussed. It's not like plutons pluton through the atmosphere and become plutons all the time.
Seriously though, the word 'nucleus' has several different definitions in different branches of science, and I've never had problems with it.
because it didn't show up on MS Word's spell check, he didn't think it was that important.
Well next time, maybe the IAU should check Wikipedia just to be sure. There is some really good info there. . .
Way to go Owen.
/* somewhat functional - fix later */
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.
They should have googled it.
Sheesh, those astronomers sure are lacking in the geekiness department.
. . . does it actually merit a new word?
Yes, yes it does. Precision of technical terms is always desirable, so the trick is to find one that no one else is already using.
I suggest we look for some distinctive feature of Pluto and form the new word around that. Lesseeeeeee, it' been variously suggested that it's either an ex-moon of Neptune, or an ex-Kuiper belt object, so I suggest:
Exxon.
That one should be safe. I can' imagine anyone else wanting such an obviosly made up; and utterly stupid, word.
KFG
So... What is a Planet Again?
i'm basically saying that as we discover more and more exotic extrasolar orbital arrangements out there, the meaning of "planet" will come under ever-increasing fluidity
so basically i am saying:
1. anything round with an atmosphere is a planet. in other words titan is a "planet of saturn"
2. anything round without an atmosphere is a moon. in other words mercury is a "moon of the sun"
3. a gas giant should come to mean something different than a planet... something more akin to a star, since gas giants really are nothing but stars not massive enough to start fusing. a little more mass and we'd be in a binary star system, with jupiter shining bright
4. anything non-round=asteroid
my basic point is that the "what it is made of" should come to mean something different than the "what it orbits", and the "what it is made of" should be more important in our nomenclature than the "what it orbits." is mercury more interesting than titan? no. so why is mercury amongst the pantheon of planets and titan relegated to lowly moon status along with captured asteroids and other forlorn rocks?
titan certainly is more interesting to us than mercury, simply because it has an atmosphere. and our nomenclature should reflect that. why is something as complex and interesting as titan just a moon, like deimos and phobos, which aren't really "moon"s either, but just captured asteroids? and why is mercury a planet? it could never be as interesting as titan. having an atmosphere means something significant, MORE significant than orbital focus
look: elephants eat plants. so do ants. is that a valid system for classifying elephants and ants together, and keeping elephants apart from lions? not at all. lions and elephants are mammals, ants are insects. elephants should be classed closer to lions than to ants, because the "what it eats" is LESS important than the "how it is designed" in zoology. and this makes obvious sense. why should planetary classification be any different?
just like with planets and moons: the "what it is made of" is more interesting and important to us (titan is more important than mercury is to us) than the "what it orbits", mercury is just a moon. titan is a planet
our nomenclature should focus on composition over orbital focus. and our current system of placing orbital focus over composition will be shown to be more and more broken as our catalogue of satellites grows and grows as we discover more and more exotic extrasolar arrangements
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I have a bachelor's degree in Geology and this never crossed my mind before, I'm sort of embarrased that this never never happened. Now that someone has mentioned that "pluton" refers to both an intrusive igneous body and a type of planet, I think that the IAU was pretty stupid. Then again IIRC, in Geology "pluton" may be deprecated because I don't recall too many of my professors using it. The perferred word, in Geology, may be "intrusion", but what do I know?
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1. anything round with an atmosphere is a planet. in other words titan is a "planet of saturn"
2. anything round without an atmosphere is a moon. in other words mercury is a "moon of the sun"
Even our moon has an atmosphere. Is it really a planet?
If you set an arbitrary "value" for minimum atmosphere, what do you do with planet/moons that fluctuate with their orbit? Do they change categories when they warm up and get more of an atmosphere, and then return to being a moon when they freeze again?
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pluton |plotän| noun Geology a body of intrusive igneous rock. ORIGIN 1930s: back-formation from plutonic .
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I demand (DEMAND!) that everything that orbits the sun be called "natural space satellite" and that all other objects that do not orbit the sun be called a "space pebble" except for man made extra terrestrial matter that will be called "space junk" and that satellites of my newly termed "natural space satellite" be called a "remote natural space satellite" and that satellites of those satellites be called "remote natural space satellite subtype a [or b, c, d, e...]" and so on and so forth for satellites of satellites of satellites (and so on and so on...)
Now as for light within in the the heliosphere but not within the atmosphere of a satellite it must be called "space light type [star, phosphorescent gasses, space junk emitted]".
And the tails of comets must be re-termed as "debris of satellite [enter satellite name]" and that any solid particles put off in the tails of the comet over a half a gram must be termed "space pebble in the debris of satellite [enter satellite name]"
This of course will lead to the renaming of "meteor showers" to "space pebble fallout to natural space satellite Earth".
Furthermore we need to rename the "asteroid belt" to "natural space satellite collective between natural space satellite Mars and natural space satellite Jupiter". Objects within the "natural space satellite collective between natural space satellite Mars and natural space satellite Jupiter" that are not residence of "natural space satellite collective between natural space satellite Mars and natural space satellite Jupiter" for at least 300 years at a time must be rename "temporary natural space satellite not wholly belonging to the natural space satellite collective between natural space satellite Mars and natural space satellite Jupiter".
And this is just the tip of the iceberg! I have a million ideas on how we can further fuck up the order of things by bickering and fighting over some random bullshit that isn't going to make the slightest bit of difference under the sun.
Hold on! Damn it! A pebble is a rock formation! Jesus! My entire idea is for nothing! God damn those geologists!
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
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).
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Now that's talent!
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
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.
Gingerich is head of the IAU. He's supposed to be pretty damned smart.
He used a word processor SPELL CHECK dictionary as the authority to determine the existence of a scientific/technical term.
A SPELL CHECK dictionary. Used as the authority to determine the exisatence of a scientific term.
The head of the International Astronomic Union. Spell check dictionary. Existence of a scientific term.
Is anybody home??
He may as well have done no research into the background of the term. He would have looked less stupid that way. Sloppy and careless maybe, but not stupid.
And how is it he got to this position and how long will he be allowed to remain? Maybe he was elected so he wouldn't hurt himself running with scissors.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
You're confusing causation with correlation. Happens a lot here.
The US obesity epidemic (sudden spike, hence use of the term epidemic) is a lot newer than our wide doors. Cultural differences around personal space are a far more likely culprit. Lay it to the size of the country, wild west mentality, or what you will, but Americans expect a larger cushion of personal space than do most other nationalities, and this is old news. More recently, our passageways are also influenced by laws about emergency egress and disabled access, with 3' mandated for wheelchairs in particular.
Considering which came first, it's more valid to suggest our expansive personal space caused our epidemic obesity. Think of it as Manifest Destiny of the self.
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