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Makemake Becomes the Newest Dwarf Planet
Kligat writes "The Kuiper belt object formerly known as (136472) 2005 FY9 has been rechristened Makemake and classified as a dwarf planet and plutoid by the International Astronomical Union, according to the United States Geological Survey. The reclassification occurs just a month after the latter category was created. The object was referred to by the team of discoverers by the codename Easterbunny, and the name Makemake comes from the creation deity of Easter Island, in accordance with IAU rules on naming Kuiper belt objects."
I miss Pluto.
$ make dwarf_planet
make: *** No rule to make target `dwarf_planet'. Stop.
Alright, well, that doesn't help at all. Maybe this?
make: *** No rule to make target `make'. Stop.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
I've got to say, I think the compromise struck is a pretty good one. Pluto being a planet with similar objects not being a planet was not really scientific.
Plus, plutoid has a good ring to it.
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
If there's a planet called InstallInstall, the entire universe can be recreated. From scratch. :D
Shouldn't it be named Module::Build?
Sorry I didn't include this in the submission, but Michael E. Brown, the leader of the discovery teams of Makemake and Eris, wrote a blog entry about his experience picking a name for the object. It's supposed to be pronounced "maki-maki," Hawaiian-style as he calls it. He likes to name objects discovered around the time his wife was pregnant after fertility gods and goddesses. You might remember "lila," his child's name, being in the URL of the Eris discovery announcement web page.
I want my planet Easterbunny!!
Can't you just use the -j2 option to run it 2x in parallel?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Hey, it's the first dwarf planet that comes with it's own Mike Oldfield theme song -- Neat!
This is the best restaurant I ever eat in
... but not as much as I miss Goofy.
Easter Island creation deity.
Two years ago, I knew how many "planets" our solar system contained. Then a change was made... then changed again... now another. I do not even know the total any more.
That "makemake" is from Japanese or some other language... and that the guy who named it wasn't really just a complete loser.
Do we need to start telling people to RTFS (Read the Fucking Summary) as well as the usual RTFA now?
C/P directly from the Summary:
"The object was referred to by the team of discoverers by the codename Easterbunny, and the name Makemake comes from the creation deity of Easter Island, in accordance with IAU rules on naming Kuiper belt objects."
...that the name for their creation deity as written is automatically read by English speakers as make make. (even though it's pronounced makimaki)
I don't therefore I'm not.
greatgreat
I prefer (136472) 2005 FY9
This is the second worse name in the Solar system. I vote to rename Uranus to Urectum while we're at it.
Winkey shortcut mapping for 64bit windows. WinKeyPlus
I also miss Pluto. Although, I don't miss waiting 5 minutes between screens.
The definition has no scientific usefullness. I have no problem with creating taxonomies purely for local use, but they should at least tell you something about the objects you are classifying. Plutinos, cubiwanos, twotinos, are all usefull categorizations of objects by their orbits in the Kuiper belt, which is likely correlated to their orgins. Dwarf planet is a usefull categorization of things bigger than an asteroid, but smaller than a planet.
Plutinoid is just stupid - all the dwarf planets except Ceres. Yes, I know that Ceres has different orgins and makeup than the large KBOs, but there is an awful lot of variation between those as well. If we wanted a more specific definition than dwarf planet then we should have waited until we knew more about them so we could make one that has some meaning.
When we're counting humans, don't we also count dwarf humans?
Dwarf humans? I am only familiar with elf humans and orc humans. Or are they in Fourth Edition?
Did the leader of the team have a Burger King Loaded Steakhouse Burger after he found the plutoid.
Stop throwing things at it, then.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Why does it matter? Well, think back a few days to the recent news on the DNA analysis of birds. Turns out, the definition based on appearances is completely wrong. What was it, kestrels are genetically closer to hummingbirds than any other bird of prey? And the DNA variation between any two lineages within a species has next to zero correspondence to morphology. In other words, looking at something from the outside tells you bugger all. So, naturally, looking at the outside of an object orbiting the sun is the perfect way to tell what it is. It's only a method every other discipline has now ruled to be faulty, after all.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Seriously... is this a joke? What happened to the times that we named planets after gods? Oh wait.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
hehe, you just made me snicker sir.
Show a man some news, distract him for an hour. Show a man some mod points, distract him for the rest of his life.
For those that understand IPA, the correct pronunciation is: /ma:kima:ki/
---- Don't lick something unless you really mean it.
Except:
1. Even for birds, there are classifications which are useful even if they don't reflect the DNA. E.g., a "bird of prey" or "flightless bird" are still useful categories, no matter to whom the individual species are related.
Basically a category is just a way to say "all these have property X", no matter what X is or in what other categories they also belong. Grouping them by DNA is just _one_ of the many possible groupings. It's useful, no doubt, but it's not the only useful one. It doesn't make all others faulty. No, even the ones based on looking from the outside. Sorry.
I fail to see why the same can't apply to planets. We already have such categories as being in the right band to have liquid water too, for example. It tells you bugger all about its interior, but it does tell you that the exterior _could_ support Earth-like life. It's a useful category. Even if it's based on where it happens to be.
2. These have no DNA so to speak. They're chunks of rock and ice.
And a lot of other stuff is pretty much based on how big they are and where they are. E.g., whether it has one core or no core or multiple cores, is pretty much just an issue of how big it is. If gravity was high enough, it pulled the heavy stuff towards the centre. If not, not.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Anyone else get a Church of Scientology ad with this article? It was very odd... (that it exists, the ad itself is fairly plain)
The number of rocks in the solar system doesn't change, no matter what the scientists call them. (Well, I suppose some little rocks are flying in an out on a frequent basis, and sometimes they congeal into bigger rocks or fall into the sun, but those are mostly rocks we don't care about. As opposed to, well, rocks that we care about because they're traditionally the rocks we have cared about.)
Personally, I don't much care what they call them. At least when they're debating about what to call them they can't simultaneously spend half a billion dollars to go examine their rockness up close. (Hint: the sum toto of the results to every NASA mission ever made to another rock is "Yep, its a rock, alright. A bit different than that wet rock we spend most of our time on, but still quite rocky. We need another $500 million to probe its rockness further.")
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
There is no "mistake" to be made in choosing between two essentially arbitrary definitions which have no basis in external reality. Nothing has changed about Pluto. Nothing of substance has changed of our understanding of Pluto. (It is not like our understanding of biology, where new DNA evidence comes to light and two organisms we had previously assumed to be related becaused they looked similar turn out to have no recent common ancestry.)
The only thing which has changed is our arbitrary definitions.
There is a great hue and cry that one way to arbitrarily define things is not merely customary but that it is Correct and that all other forms are Unscientific. That, my friend, is dogma in its purest form.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Silly, didn't you know that MakeMaker is DOOMED?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
So, are you suggesting that Venus, or Aphrodite, be renamed Fuckfuck?
We need one of these objects to be named 'Rupert' in honour of the Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Don't react to it , it's exactly that kind of negative attention he's craving for.
Slipping shoelaces ?
Don't call them "Dwarf planets" They prefer the term "Gravitationally Challenged"!!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
The International Asteroid Registry
"Forget stars... name a cold, hard rock after your ex."
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Since the term is polynesian rather than anglo, I'm guessing it pronounced maki-maki instead of mayk-mayk. But I'm not sure.
You could just as easily be a different AC, being as you didn't capitalize the N-word. The original douchebag could be someone looking to smear the site, you could be a new douchebag just looking for attention. Or you could both be douchebags looking for attention - but we can fairly assume that you are not the same anonymous cowards.
There are eight planets and four dwarf planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, (Ceres), Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, (Pluto), (Eris), (Makemake). (Dwarf planets in quotes.) Ceres used to be called an asteroid because it's in the asteroid belt, but it's really too big for that. The others have been there all along, but they're way out there, so it takes a while to figure out if they qualify as a planet. If you're really trying to keep up, you might want to make some notes about Quaoar and Sedna which might wind up on the list.
On the bright side, at least you don't have Fisher Price's problem. They've got a toy line called Planet Heroes and their designer apparently hasn't been keeping up on his email. They were two planets down when the line came out and they just fell further behind by one more, but the kids are being taught with more current material.
My seven-year-old was telling a friend all about Planet Heroes when my friend, just to be funny, asked him about Ceres. My son gave him a disgusted look and said, in the tone of someone pointing out the obvious, "That's in the asteroid belt."
I almost fell out of my chair laughing.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====