Slashdot Mirror
Pluto Making a Comeback
anthemaniac writes "Space.com reports that the American Astronomical Unions Division of Planetary Scientists recognizes the IAU's authority to make a new planet defintion but expects it to be altered. Separately, 300 astronomers have signed a petition saying they won't use the definition. All this stems from the discontent over how only 424 astronomers voted on the proposal that demoted Pluto. Looks like this little dog is on the comeback trail."
Well, the trouble is that there is no old definition at all, save perhaps "there are nine of them, these nine." It's a planet because it's been called a planet in the past. That definition doesn't work when you start trying to classify the bodies in another solar system, of course. The reason Pluto has been left out of the formal definition is that it's too small. Way too small. And irregular. Any definition that included pluto would also be including three other bodies... and schools would have to teach TWELVE planets, not eight or nine. The trouble started way back when Pluto was discovered. It was discovered by an American, and as you know, Americans are a proud lot. So a few years later when it was discovered to be far smaller than first suspected, noone wanted to back down and admit it wasn't really a planet at all. In other words, they had to invent a defintion of a planet, and no definition that they could come up with included Pluto, but excluded the three other Pluto-like bodies.
That scientific "fact" can be changed by petition.
Yes, I know that this whole planet thing is just taxonomy, but do they? Do the politicians really understand that, either?
"Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer." -Adolf Hitler
"We are one Nation, we are one People." -The One 'leader'
anything else would be jumping the gun
I am much happier thinking that astronomers are in a hole somewhere in the middle of the night staring into the sky adding to the human body of knowledge, then sitting in a giant auditorium fighting over meaningless bullshit and operating at the lowest forms of the intellectual discourse (semantics and sophistry... voting on definitions.. oh jesus). I liked it better when a bunch of people sitting in a giant room yelling and screaming about nothing and being otherwise useless was called Congress...
This is an argument over terminology. There is nothing of any value, at all, at stake here. This is so people can refer to planets and have it mean something, as a word. This is basically the equivalent of Webster writing down what a word means. This isn't even actual science.. it's just a bunch of people trying to formalize their industry's terminology to facillitate communication. The scientific value of a probe is going to be exactly the same if Pluto is a dwarf planet, a pluton, a planet, a really large Kuiper Belt Object, or anything else.
Just pick a god damm definition. I'm starting to think astronomers are doing this on purpose to get themselves alot of free press and airtime. Professors everywhere are making 6 minutes TV and radio spots to explain this stupid "controversy". It's semantics. Nothing more, nothing less.
What more information do we need about Pluto? There's lots to learn, but nothing that bears on the argument at hand.
You seem to think that "planet" is a word astronomer's agree on, and we just don't know enough about Pluto to say whether it is one. It's the other way around.
Despite the headlines, astronomers are not arguing over whether Pluto's a planet. They're arguing over the right way to define "planet". Pluto's relevent only because lots of people are used to thinking of Pluto as a planet, and don't want a definition that leaves Pluto out. But that's hard to do. There are millions of trans-Neptunian objects. If Pluto is a planet, than so are many of them.
I heard an interview with an astronmer who described our solar system as it would be seen by an alien arriving from outside. The first thing the alien would notice is the huge cloud of trans-Neptunian objects. Then much further in he'd see 8 planets. Or maybe he'd view them as 4 rocky worlds and 4 gaseous worlds. But in any case he'd differentiate all 8, which orbit pretty much in a single plane, from the TNOs, which form a sort of donut-shaped cloud. If he noticed Pluto at all, he'd definitely classify it with the TNOs.
Then suppose he met us, and we tried to tell him that Pluto isn't a TNO, it's a planet, just because it was discovered before the TNOs. He'd think we were being pretty arbitrary — and he'd be right.
You're actually serious, aren't you? In what way exactly does it kick any ass? The metric systems covers lenght, volume, force... all consistent and based on one, single meter.
The "standard" (that is, the standard in the US and hardly anywhere else) is based on how many definitions for lenth etc.? How many pints of fuel are in a rocket? Would that be american pints or british dry pints or british liquid pints? How many inches go into a mile? Would that be a normal mile or a nautical one? How many ounces does a quibic yard or foot of water weigh at room temperature?
The so called (by you) "standard" system is a mess, historically grown and a nightmare to handle.
I am a profesional astronomer and in my experiance most of my collegues could not really care less about this. For evidance, the fact that so few people voted shows that most astronomers are more interested in real science, not pointless naming conventions.
...I just don't get why this is raising such a fuss.
When I was a kid, there were Baltimore Orioles. Then they decided that they were really the same species as Bullock's Oriole and both of them got renamed the "Northern Oriole." Then molecular genetics studies suggested they were really all that similar and now there are Baltimore Orioles again.
My science teachers were old enough to remember when _their_ sciences teachers had said "There are ninety-two elements. There have always been ninety-two elements. There will always be ninety-two elements." And "elementary" particles? Don't get me started...
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus. Then it was Xiphosura polyphemus. Now it ''seems'' to be Limulus again... or is it?
Classification is prescientific activity. It's very important but it's always arbitrary and subject to change.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Then I guess we should reclassify Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta planets as well... you know, for historic reasons.
/sarcasm
Originally the Sun and moon were classified as planets. Should we keep that definition for historic reasons?
What about all the round trans-Neptunian objects? 2003 UB313, Charon, Sedna, Quaoar, or the 1000 others? Should all those be planets as well? And if you're gonna include at least everything in the Kuiper belt, you might as well include all the round asteroids. And all the round Trojan bodies.
Shoot, while you're at it, why don't we just include every single comet in the Oort cloud? Then the solar system would have billions of planets. Take that 55 Cancri!
I don't understand why people have a hard time "letting go" of Pluto as a planet... It's floating in a cloud of objects, just like Ceres. And just like Ceres, once we discovered that it's just one of many (some even larger) in a belt of objects, it got reclassified. What's so freggin' hard to understand?