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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?
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
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.
... but not as much as I miss Goofy.
If astronomers couldn't change the number of planets as new information became available, then astronomy would be dogma instead of a science. To me the pluto demotion has been a great illustration of science at work. Educators should be using it as an example of the difference between science and dogma. Mistake made, mistake corrected.
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)
So, are you suggesting that Venus, or Aphrodite, be renamed Fuckfuck?
I agree with the principle of dogma vs. science, but I don't think this is the best example. It doesn't do well for credibility if you keep changing your mind based on unstable definitions and pretend it to be news each time you've tweaked one of them.
It's not "changing your mind", it's discovering new information. The discovery of Pluto was an accident (due to an error in calculation, a much bigger planet was predicted in that location, but it wasn't there), and because Kuiper Belt Objects were unknown at that time, Pluto got planetary status, although it was immediately obvious that it was a very abnormal planet.
Eventually it became clear that Pluto had to be a Kuiper Belt Object. As long as it was the only big one, that wasn't much of a problem, but eventually, astronomers discovered KBOs that were as big as or even bigger than Pluto, and a choice had to be made. Leaving Pluto a planet while denying that status to other large KBOs would be silly and unscientific, so either all large KBOs would become planets, resulting in dozens or hundreds of extra planets in our solar system, most of which would share similar irregular orbits, or accept that KBOs are different from regular planets, and give them their own class. That's what happened. Maybe they should have demoted Pluto earlier, but it was unavoidable, and by the time it happened, it was long overdue.
Not that this wasn't the first time planets had been demoted. In the 19th century, Ceres and a couple of other asteroids were also considered planets, but eventually astronomers decided that since they shared a similar orbit with lots of smaller asteroids, they had to be a different class of objects from the regular planets. Ceres and the others didn't have planetary status for as long as Pluto did, but that was due to Pluto accidentally being discovered way before we technically should be able to do so.