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."
...in other news today, doctors tried to demote any penis that is not at least 7 inches long to 'dwarf penis' status.
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.
Too late, solar system already took Pluto off of his Friends List.
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'
For those of you at home who are playing along, here's the score so far:
~800 bc - Roman god of the underworld.
05-01-1930 - New planet. Also Mickey's new canine companion. Retains position as god of the underworld.
08-10-2006 - Still a planet. And a dog. Takes time off as god of the underworld to "spend more time with his new ceslestial family".
08-24-2006 - Demoted as a planet. Reclassified as a "dwarf planet" (or as they prefer to be called "Little planetiods"). Resumes job as god of the underworld.
Today - A planet again. Maybe. Title of "Roman god the the underworld" undisputed. Still a dog.
(ps. Tomorrow - Profit ???)
Shameless plug for my photos on Flickr
The rest of the world can use the metric planets that evolved in our solar system.
There. Everyone happy now?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
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.
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 [rather than] sitting in a giant auditorium fighting over meaningless bullshit and operating at the lowest forms of the intellectual discourse
:-)
Kind of like Slashdot, you mean?
Table-ized A.I.
We can't take it back now, we've arlready sent it out in the "Arecibo message". We're going to like pretty silly to the aliens in the m13 cluster. So are we going to have to resend that signal, saying "Whoops our bad, its eight not nine planets....no really, we do know how to count."
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. . .
You're new here in science, aren't you?
Just pick a god damm definition.
Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing!
Come on people, let's show these Bozos the power of the Web. Send letters, emails, customized party poppers, whatever; and let 'em know we want our Big Ass Round Things.
KFG
Your post intrigued me, and after some quick research with the help of Google, I agree. You can fire up Celestia and actually see some of them, just make asteroid orbits and names visible. Pluto fits right in with them; it seems to be the largest of them.
For you unbelievers, here's a list. These objects are all out of the "normal" plane of orbits, just like Pluto.
Name, Radius
Pluto, 1,151km
Ixion, 600km
Quaoar, 625km
Orcus, 800km
Varuna, 450km
And these are just some "nicely named" ones. See "2003 EL61", "2005 FY9", etc for more examples. And you can add more as well. For those with computers that aren't slow, this page contains a Celestia ssc of 1007(!) TNOs. Doughnut shaped indeed.
Also, there is a class (like 20%-30%) of them called Plutinos which share Pluto's stable 3:2 orbital resonance with Neptune. How did this come to be? There are theories, but nothing definitive yet.
The debate will continue, but if you look at that Celestia ssc of 1007 TNOs, it is pretty clear that Pluto is not a "major planet". If it is, then we've got dozens, possibly hundreds of them.
(Apologies if this has been covered before.)
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
We can't take it back now, we've arlready sent it out in the "Arecibo message". We're going to like pretty silly to the aliens in the m13 cluster. So are we going to have to resend that signal, saying "Whoops our bad, its eight not nine planets....no really, we do know how to count."
:)
No, it's a plausible deniability thing. If they're good aliens, they come here, we explain that we were very primitive but have since learned to count.
If they're bad aliens, we say "What? We only have eight planets. This isn't the solar system you're looking for. Move along..."
If they are bad aliens, we simply ask them if they want the same fate as the 9th planet had. They won't mess with us after that.
2*31*37*263
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?
So, you want school children to learn millions of planets instead of eight, just so Pluto can be a planet?
Then they'd have to learn things like, "My Very Eager Mother Just Sent Us New Pajamas Which Didn't Fit Properly So We Had To Go Back To Walmart And Exchange Them For Better Ones But We Didn't Have The Receipt So There Was Nothing Else To Do But Cause A Distraction In The Store And Run Out With The Correct Ones And Then We Went To McDonald's And I Had A Big Mac With Small Fries But Then..."