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IAU Demotes Pluto to 'Dwarf Planet' Status
davidwr writes "It's official. Pluto's been demoted. It's now one of several 'dwarf planets.' I guess we can drop the 'Period' from 'Mary's violet eyes make John stay up nights.'" (Of course, no one says you have to privately agree with the International Astronomical Union.) Several readers have contributed links to the BBC's coverage of the downgrade, as well as the usefully illustrated story at MSNBC.
many very educated men just screwed up nine planets...
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nachos
How will this affect Sailor Pluto?
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
So will this render all astrological predictions which took Pluto into account as invalid? I'm sure the kooks will come up with some excuse to explain how their previous charts were accurate at seeing the future as if they ~knew~ this all along.
Trolling is a art,
Much vodka easily makes John seek urination naturally
I just can't understand why this story of Pluto's reclassification is deemed "breaking news" on the major news websites. It's not as if it just changed orbit and was streaking straight for New Jersey...
Now that would be breaking news!
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Walt Disney is turning over in his grave...
I learned "Mary Virginia eats many jam sandwiches under Ned's porch." Now it will have to be "...under Ned."
I remember failing a second grade test because I missed pluto! Time I march down to the nursing home and give Mrs Johnson a piece of my mind!
Actually, "dwarf planet" is considered rude.
It prefers to be called a "little planet".
(And besides, if Pluto is going to be the dwarf planet, which planet do the elves get? Or the hobbits? Won't someone think of the hobbits?)
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
I don't like this at all.
You IAU bastards! Now, My Very Educated Mother no longer Just Sat Under Napoleon's Picture. Now, My Very Educated Mother Just Sat Under Napoleon.
You guys are sick. Leave my mother out of this.
Michael Coyne
http://turthalion.blogspot.com
Gustav Holst was right all along!
Well Neptune doesn't have a vastly odd orbit for a start...
If we can hit that bull's-eye, the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards... Checkmate.
I got in similar trouble to telling my teacher that her solar system model was wrong because all of her planets were on the same plane. And, got in more trouble when I mentioned that Pluto is not the furthist planet from the sun, but rather Neptune was (at least, at that time). Of course, the worst was when I corrected a teacher whom said Saturn was the only planet with rings.
Click here or here.
Before Pluto was discovered, there was "Mother Visits Every Monday and Just Stays Until Noon". (Note that the "and" covers the asteroid belt!) Adding Pluto changed this to "...Until Noon, Period". I propose we just go back to the original.
Quick, someone who actually knows what they're doing, please give me a rough answer/calculation to the following queries:
Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.
1) - Is it possible for Pluto and Neptune to one day (like within the next couple billion years) collide? Or are their respective orbits degrading to the point where by the time they'd be near each other orbit-wise, their orbits would no longer overlap significantly? Or by 'overlap' do they mean "diagrammatically speaking, on a two-dimensional representation they overlap but even at their closest possible point they're still a squillion miles away from each other"?
2) - If so, how cool would that be? Would it be funny enough to make it onto an America's Funniest Home Videos video montage? Would it need special clown-horn-honking sound effects?
3) - Considering their distance from Earth and their relatively small size, would a collision of the two have any noticeable effect here on Earth?
4) - Seriously, how cool would worlds colliding be?! Costanza jokes aside, I think it'd be awesome to the max.
Nine little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one was deemed too small, and then there were eight...
Eight little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one was deemed too big, and then there were seven...
Seven little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one had too many rings, and then there were six...
Six little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one got too close and melted, and then there were five...
Five little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one got too cold and froze, and then there were four...
Four little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one had too many clouds, and then there were three...
Three little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one had a clash with its neighbour, and then there were two...
Two little planets, orbiting around the Sun, one got bored and left with its moons, and then there was one...
One little planet, orbiting around the Sun, we nuked it ourselves, and then there were none!
"Fix it? It has been disintegrated, by definition it cannot be fixed!" - Gru in Despicable Me.
You know what the problem with this "What is a Planet?" debate. There is no metric. It is the case, and always has been, that whether or not something is a "planet" is a matter of almost complete subjectivity. There is still no objective, measurable and testable model under which an object can be said to be a planet.
In programming terms, the function:
bool Is_Planet( Astronomical_Object* foo );
, does not yet exist. Well, under some proposals, it would have existed in the following form:
bool Is_Planet( Astronomical_Object* foo ){
return (Is_Kinda_Big(foo) && Is_Kinda_Spherical(foo));
}
Great. Let's have a big round of applause of the boys at the IAU. Seriously, an eight year old could have come up with this. "Well, it's kinda round!". What if it's elliptical? What if it's a cylinder? Elliptical cylinder? What about Dyson Sphere's? Ringworld's? What if it has bumps? Depressions? Great big crater holes? Gentlemen What about the Death Star?
500+ years of modern astronomy and still no definition for a planet. Is this professionalism? Look at the difference in comparision to other scientific fields. The SI units give precise, unambiguous definitions of every observable quantity in the universe. Can we get something similar in astronomy please?
OK, I'm ranting, but here's somthing that astronomers can really chew over. Is their definition of a planet falisfiable? If not, are they really scientists, or just stargazers?
May the Maths Be with you!
8 Planets and 8 Dwarfs? Sounds simple enough...
That's Size Challenged Planets
Thank you very much...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Given the level of scientific illiteracy, what the hell is the point of taking something that everyone does know and declaring it to be wrong?
"Everyone" knew there were eight planets prior to 1930. Did the world end when it was changed to nine, especially with something that wasn't even obviously a planet?
Guess what? A whole generation of children will grow up with the new, consistent rules and won't know any different. What's unarguable is that the new rules are better. I'm all in favor of fixing things that are broken, even if certain curmudgeons are too mentally inflexible to make the adjustment. See also: the metric system in the US, which is kept down by the same curmudgeons.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
FTA - "Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's." and from the definition, "and has cleared the neighborhood around its rbit."
Doesn't that mean that Neptune also hasn't cleared it's neighborhood? It's orbit overlaps that of Pluto. So why is IT a planet?
Excuse me, that's Differently Proportioned Planets!!!
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/8/24/102112/777
Just before coming down to speak with you, I called Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus and congratulated them on their success today. As I see it, in this campaign, we've just finished the first half and the Classical Planet team is ahead, but in the second half, our team -- Team Pluto -- is going to surge forward to victory.
I am, of course, disappointed by the results, but I am not discouraged. I am not disappointed because I lost my planetary status, but because the old politics of scholarship and intellectual integrity won today.
I expect my opponents will continue to do in the future what they have done today: Belittle me instead of coming up with ideas to avoid having to rewrite science textbooks.
I will continue to offer the astronomers a different path forward to make my Solar system and orbit a better place to live and work, and that's what I want to do for another six million more years.
I know a lot of people in this system, and not just "classical planets", are angry about the direction in which the Solar system is moving, and so am I.
Tomorrow morning, our campaign will file the necessary petition with the International Astronomical Union so that we can continue this campaign for a new astronomy of unity and purpose. I will always do what is right for my orbit and Solar system regardless of what the political consequences may be.
Tomorrow is a brand new day. Tomorrow we launch a new campaign -- Team Pluto -- Asteroids, non-conforming celestial objects and planets.
Thanks,
Mike
The definition of brown dwarf is pretty well... defined. There was no debate over the upper size limit for a planet because the dividing line is the ability to fuse deuterium (heavy hydrogen). This is theorized to be about 13 Jupiter masses. The upper limit for deuterium fusion is about 83 Jupiter masses (8% the mass of the sun), at which point the object can fuse hydrogen and is considered a normal star. So, really, the definition of brown dwarf is not arbitrary at all (being an object between 13 and 83 Jupiter masses).
But isn't the Moon's distance from Earth slowly increasing thus, surely, the binary planet definition will also apply to the Earth+Moon eventually?
Interplanet Janet, she's a galaxy girl,
A solar system Ms. from a future world,
She travels like a rocket with her comet team
And there's never been a planet Janet hasn't seen,
There's never been a planet Janet hasn't seen.
Argh. Now I will have that song stuck in my head all day long. Of course now that Pluto has been demoted, they will need to revise the verse that says:
Mars is red and Jupiter's big
And Saturn shows off its rings.
Uranus is built on a funny tilt
And Neptune is its twin,
And Pluto, little Pluto is the farthest planet from our sun.
If you're feeling nostalgic, the complete lyrics and a .wav clip
are on this
web site.
So, instead of the descriptor being a subset it is a superset.
Sorry, I should have said mutually exclusive set. Really wikipedia has a good diagram, but the orderly diagram makes it appear to be a logical distinction rather the linguistic mess that it is.
A: Pluto is a planet
B: No, Pluto is a dwarf Planet.
A: Yes, that's right I said it was a planet.
B: But it is a dwarf planet, so you are wrong.
A: Isn't a dwarf planet just a type of planet?
B: No.
A: Then why is it called a planet at all
B: uhhh, cause we are really just nostalgic about describing pluto as a planet
A: Is that any reason to screw up the defintion for future generations
B: Ah just get your own solar system, our defintions are specific to just this one.
At least in this case, they weren't using the term incorrectly for the most part. They actually had it right.
/.)
No. We've known for decades that the "planet" Pluto was far smaller than any other planet and made of fundamentally different stuff. And through all that time, astronomers let it go because every time one of them mentioned that Pluto wasn't really a planet he was shouted down by the public. Now that we know there are dozens of bodies just like Pluto - and some even larger - what little scientific accuracy there was in calling Pluto a planet is completely lost.
Face it, the astronomers weren't going to come out of this looking good no matter what:
1. They develop a definition of "planet" that includes Pluto and, by association, dozens of other bodies. Effect: The public freaks out about "those crazy scientists". (For proof, just read the previous article on this subject here at
2. They develop a definition of "planet" that excludes dozens of small bodies and, by association, Pluto. Effect: The public freaks out about "those crazy scientists". (For proof, read this thread).
3. They develop an entirely new set of definitions using brand new words that no one's ever heard of before. Effect: The public freaks out about "those crazy scientists" who are trying to complicate a "perfectly simple situation".
And, of course, there's the fact that any one who gets upset over this really has far too much free time on their hands.
Clear, Dark Skies