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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."
The publishers are loving this.
they pissed off a LOT of people.
What more can you say?
So... What is a Planet Again?
the issue centers on one the IAU itself says it hasn't addressed with it's new definition of a planet: extrasolar systems. as new telescopes come on line with more resolving power, our bestiary of planets is going to grow by leaps and bounds. it will render the debate over pluto moot
i think a definition of planet should be:
-round, with a significant atmosphere
-this is distinct from a gas giant, which should be considered closer to stars than to planets (round, mostly gas: really just stars without enough critical mass to ignite fusion)
-and distinct from a moon (no atmosphere, but still round)
-asteroids, comets, etc make up the miscellany
and notice, most importantly, i said nothing about what something orbits. what something orbits is really secondary in consideration to what something is composed of. if we find an earth-like "moon" orbiting a gas giant in another solar system, is what it orbits really the first consideration in picking what to call it? no, composition should come first, orbit second. so you could have a moon of the sun (pluto), or a planet of saturn (titan), or an asteroid of mars (deimos/ phobos, etc.)
so this system demotes not only pluto, but also mercury. while promoting titan. so our solar system is composed of:
-4 planets (venus, earth, mars, titan)
-4 gas giants (jupiter, saturn, neptune, uranus)
-and countless moons (of the sun and the planets)/ asteroids (of the sun and the planets)/ comets/ ring systems/ kuiper belt, oort cloud objects/ etc
really, as we see more and more exotic arrangements in extrasolar systems as new telescopes come on line, this debate about pluto will look more and more pedantic. and the IAU should really begin focusing on a more rigid definition no matter what, something they said they weren't doing at their last congress. we will soon have a vastly larger catalogue of strange orbital objects/ arrangements out there. pluto is small potatoes... literally
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Since the borderline is probably going to have to be arbitrary, why not use Pluto's diameter as the minimum? If other Kuiper objects are bigger, like Xena, then make Xena a planet also. If we end up with 20 planets, so be it. 25 is about classroom size anyhow such that each kid can get a planet assigned instead of sharing that is done now. Who knows, maybe there is a Mars-sized Kuiper object out there. Dismissing Kuiper objects just because they are "far" is kinda arbitrary. Size is a better criteria than distance.
Table-ized A.I.
Two things: 1> Taxonomic classifications will never satisfy everyone, nor will they ever be precise enough to cover all cases. 2>Its sad that the news focuses so much on this non-issue. Its not important! There are other things much more important that need the airtime. 3>This reminds me of old snotty aristocrats who pride themselves on their extensive and obscure vocabulary because it distinguishes them from the common man. Sorry..I'm studying for my GRE's.. Words like Stygian.. I mean fuck you, if you know what that means. and lastly, 4>They will finally figure out that Pluto is not a planet, it s a dog.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I think a lot of the summaries have missed the point.
The final "definitions" that they came up are not scientifically useful or even useful for any reason. No better than the previous enumeration of planets. Really a lot worse in that now by definition planets only exist in our solar system. So, all those things that orbit other stars... oh well now they are just thingies that orbit other stars. The draft proposal seemed much better by comparison and provided a much more broadly applicable definition. Hell kick pluto out of the main planets if you want, but do so by increasing some arbitrary size threshold and then don't use planet as part of the name for whatever you are left with, at least if by definition it is now not a planet or any type of planet. Even the dorky sounding "pluton" would have been better than "dwarf planet"
And you have to imagine we are going to be finding a lot more planets around other stars in the coming decades as telescopes and processing power improve. or we would have, now we can't since all we can find is something that has no category of its own, unless they too will get a two word name that includes the word planet, such as "extrasolar planet" even though the word "planet" alone is not applicable.
And the part about clearing the neighborhood of the orbit part of the definition seems like it could be problematic from an observational standpoint. The idea that even if we agree to extend this new "definition" to other star systems, then observations probably won't be sensitive enough to be able to determine if the planet-like object has cleared all the asteroids from the "neighborhood". So, until we actually go to another star system, the likelyhood of finding another object and consitently (with the definition) say that we have found a planet will be nil.
Those of you who think the problem some of us have with these problematic new definitions is merely nostalgia, think again.
Bring back the draft proposed definitions and maybe tinker with those a bit. These ones they came up with need to be thrown out.
Unless more deviousactiond undermines this effort (like killing astroligy), You might be correct in that they are doing this for the attention. Keeping Pluto listed as a planet just for historic reasons should be enough. It isn't like we found the flat earth was actualy round. With pluto and planets we just made a definition, changed the meanings, and then discovered pluto doesn't fit into it now.
Pluto is and always should be a planet. If they try to claim it isn't, i think it will start a bigger controversy then creation verses evolution when taught in schools.
That's how science works.
It is NOT how science works! Science is not a democracy. Facts, definitions and terms are not up for a vote. A ridiculously tiny handful of "scientists" forgot that last week.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
...is that because of the New Horizons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons mission NASA and US astronomers has been pushing for a definition where Pluto is a planet because it is more prestigious to send a probe to a planet than to a dwarf planet. We are supposed to be scientists, and make definitons that make sense from a scientific point of view, but this is politics.
I really liked the original suggestion. It's a planet if:
* It is round under its own gravity
* it is not already classified as a star
* It is not a satellite to something else not classified as a star (ie. when the common point of rotation is located within the body of the other object)
A possible fourth criteria could be:
* It orbits something classified as a star
though I'd be happy without that criteria, making solitary, wandering bodies be called planets as well.
Sure, that will probably get us planets by the dozen as we get a clearer idea of what't out in the edges of our system - but why is that a problem? It's not like having nine planets has some mysterious significance, and it hasn't been nine - or eight for that matter - for very long either.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
. . . something you look at and say, "hey, that's a planet."
No, seriously. Given all the historical baggage surrounding the term "planet", people shouldn't be trying to use it as a scientific term in the first place. If you want something that can be used to scientifically denote a certain class of astronomical objects, call them "primary satellites" or something. What's wrong with saying something like this, for example? "A planet is one of the nine satellites of Sol: Mercury, Venus, Earth, ..., Pluto; or a similar object orbiting another star that is widely recognized as a planet." That keeps the status quo with respect to our solar system, which doesn't seem to have hurt anything in the 76 years it's been around, and lets public opinion decide on anything else that pops up. Which leaves astronomers free to spend their valuable time actually watching the sky rather than trying to convince people that something that looks like a planet and smells like a planet isn't actually a planet.
My only relevant qualification for this argument is to be an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, but if anything it has meant I've been following it quite closely.
To be honest, the whole argument seems quite ridiculous to me. If the definition if a planet is so waffley that astronomers can't agree on it, then astronomers shouldn't be using the word for anything important in the first place. I'm a little surprised that the IAU saw the need to have a vote on this definition at all, and I'm even more surprised at the apparent outrage that's being expressed by professional astronomers whom I'd have thought might have had more interesting things to do with their time.
It's not as if we don't already have unambiguous ways to describe what's being referred to. The word "planet" is really just a convenience word that can be used as short-hand by people in informal communication. So what if we can count how many "planets" we have? Doing so is a convenient simplistic way to indicate about how many "big things" there are, but it doesn't even start to describe the real complexity of the Solar System.
Uh ... as the article explained, this is not about science ... it's about terminology. These guys are "real" in that they get paid to do astronomy. If you do too, then you have a professional disagreement. Happens all over science all the time.
As more non-star bodies that are found, eventually the spectrum of features will be all over the place. If the choice were mine, I'd call the classic nine planets, leave it there, and forget about deciding for a few more centuries.
"You must try to forget all you have learned. You must begin to dream." -- Sherwood Anderson
Lovell (he of canals on Mars fame) decided that there must be a huge Gas Giant out beyond Neptune, but could never find one.
In order to find this planet, and ensure that Lovell wasn't primarily remembered for his fanciful and incorrect thesis regarding life/civilisation on Mars, a junior astronomer was set to work searching for this suposed super giant Gas Planet.
Note that I say Junior, no-one else wanted the job, no-one....
Instead of a Huge Gas Giant, he found a tiny rock. As it turns out this was the first sighting of a Kuiper Belt Object, a noteworthy acheivement in itself which was sullied and robbed of its true importance as a milestone in astronomy due to the politics of the day within the astronomy movement.
So, this tiny rock was hailed as Lovells planet, in spite of the ludicrous nature of this claim, given the obvious disparity between the predicted object, and the one found. It could never have caused the gravitational perturbance by which the presence of the gas giant was inferred by Lovell.
It's status as a planet, whilst debated by some then, and many since, has been assured due to this fear of blackening Lovells name.
Interestingly, none of the astronomers who wanted Pluto to be a planet would consider calling our moon, or Ceres planets, even though admitting Pluto into the list of planets meant these, among others, would now qualify.
It is this bizarre situation that the decision regarding Pluto is seeking to resolve. That not many astronomers were there to vote is beside the point. The vote was known to be taking place a long time in advance (many months), it wasn't a rushed secret ballot or anything.
The people who want to discredit the vote don't actually have an alternative classification, they just want the ambiguity to remain.
In effect, what we have here is an old fashioned cat fight among supposedly mature people of science (predominantly men).
Oh but it is, it's very important. A precise terminology is critical to get anything done in any field.
:)
Nostalgia or neat names your kids like are no reason to violate the rules of your field. AIDS was orginally categorized as a form of cancer, but then we found that it's not a cancer, so we stopped calling it a cancer. It's simple, really. Once you disprove something, it makes no sense to go on believing it.
The simple truth is that if you call Pluto a planet, then you also have to call Ceres and potentially hundreds of bodies in the Kuiper belt planets as well. Pluto does not dominate its orbit around the sun, it shares it with Charon, they spin around each other, one is not a moon of the other. None of the other planets in the solar system have such a symbiosis, they all have moons that orbit them. What shall we do when we manage to spot specific planetary bodies in distant solar systems? "let's see... hrm, that's a class-M planet, that's a gas giant, that's a dead rock, all of these have moons and they're spherical and dominate their orbits, but hey, here's a neat looking body there dancing with another body, I guess that's a planet too, let's call it Mickey and forget the thing it's spinning with." Where does it end? We need a concise definition that works every time, no exceptions.
As it is, with that gold disc in the voyager spacecrafts showing the planets of our system, it's doubtful ET will find us now since he'll see our system has only 8 planets but his directions said there would be 9. If he stumbles into the system anyway, and finds that's he's got the right place, he's going to think we're a bunch of retards for saying we have 9 planets
Architecture and carpentry and the like benefit greatly from the Imperial system of measurements becase the base unit -- the foot -- is evenly divisible into halves, thirds, and quarters. This is something that's quite common when dealing with materials as easily manipulated and cut by hand, such as wood. While the metric system is superior in almost every other conceivable way, the Imperial system does excel in this one area, which is why I don't ever expect to see it disappearing from anything involving woodworking.
Aside from the "one foot = twelve inches" measurement, the rest of the Imperial system is complete garbage. I'm glad the entire world, except for two or three backward countries ;-), moved to the metric system years ago.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
actually - Tomatoes are fruits by a botanical defnition and vegetables by a legal one. The U.S. Supreme Court declared they were vegetables based on a definition based on the way in which they were used.
The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, standing on the moon and looking up at the Earth, it would look like the Earth hangs there in the exact same spot, 24/7/365.
Basically, stop trying to make systematic classification about what's basically leftoever garbage from when the solar system was born, it's not going to work.
Isn't Earth some of that garbage? Aren't we?
That doesn't solve the problem; we're going to have to invent lots of new words if we do that.
K.I.S.S. Call them sun-moons. Call them planets. Call them gravitationally cohesive stardust wads. All of them - comets, Pluto, 2km wide Kuiper Belt Objects, they all fit the fuzzy, historical non-objective definition of planet which has slowly been accepted as a scientific term.
I'll bet somewhere there's a moon that has several moons; not being an astronomer, I'll bet they exist in our own solar system.
I'll bet somewhere a giant star (of not to different composition than Jupiter) orbits a mammoth star (not just a binary solar system with two suns that orbit the same arbitrary point in between them).
I'll bet somewhere there's a comet with live cells containing DNA.
We're going to run out of names for this shit and make everything too confusing. Until we get out there and start walking around other solar systems like we own the universe, it's absolutely ridiculous to try and say "this collection of matter is a planet, while this one is a moon, and this one is a star, and this one is a moon of a moon, and this one is a frozen methane block, while this one is a (etc)". They're all extremely unique, and yet they're all the same.
I for one could get used to the idea of solar planets (stars), terrestreal planets (regular old planets like Venus and Earth and Pluto and Xena and Haley and Hale-Bopp) and lunar planets (moons) and sub-lunar planets (moons of moons).
I think these astronomers who are just up in arms over what to call this stuff should all sign up on Slashdot; it's the best place to go for substituting unproductive bickering for real work.