Pluto Regains Its Title As Largest Object In Its Neighborhood

sciencehabit writes "In 2005 astronomers discovered Pluto's biggest neighborhood rival: Eris, which they claimed definitely surpassed Pluto in size. Now, as astronomers report an analysis of methane gas in Pluto's atmosphere suggests that Pluto is about 2368 kilometers across, in which case it's larger than Eris and thus the champ of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, which boasts more than a thousand known objects revolving around the sun beyond Neptune's orbit."

Comments

Re:And when Eris' atmosphere is measured...

[cunniff]

From TFA:

Eris is just 2326 kilometers across—possibly smaller than Pluto, whose diameter is somewhere between 2300 and 2400 kilometers. The uncertainty arises because Pluto, unlike Eris, has air that complicates the interpretation of observational data.

Ah, the Planet Pluto

[ackthpt]

I remember it well -- before the anti Pluto is a Planet conspiracy. Good to see it's getting some recognition, rather than more damnation.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[rudy_wayne]

I remember it well -- before the anti Pluto is a Planet conspiracy. Good to see it's getting some recognition, rather than more damnation.

The whole "We changed our mind and decided that Pluto isn't a planet" is bullshit. Just say that Pluto and Eris are both planets and be done with it.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Anonymous Coward]

1) With the discovery of the other clutter that could be considered within Pluto's orbit, it means that any consistent definition of a planet would either not include Pluto, would include Ceres, or would not include Mercury. After some bickering and debate, the guys who run the telescopes decided to start calling Pluto a dwarf planet, and toss Ceres, Eris, and a couple dozen other big rocks into that bucket.

2) 'Kilo' is the metric prefix for 1000, not 1024. There already was confusion between an OS's kilobyte and a storage manufacturer's kilobyte. Kibibyte is a lame hack to try to instill some semblance of binary order in a scenario where marketing will trump all such efforts.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously.
Pluto is a fucking planet. All the morons who herpderp about it not meeting the "requirements" for being a planet need to STFU. Any "requirements" are arbitrarily-defined. Pluto was a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time. To later redefine the already arbitrary term is absurd. If you don't like the term planet, make a new term. Don't change an existing term that has widespread common and technical use, has been used in publications, etc. All you do is create ambiguity with regards to what definition someone means when they use the term. The same shit goes for "kibibytes" - you don't have to like kilobytes being 1024 bytes, but you do have to accept it. Adding "kibibytes" just creates confusion where there was none before.

Correct, the only designation of planet that is questionable is for Earth. That's just a big rock littered with assholes.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Shalaska]

First off, Pluto was originally called a planet back before all of the objects that are in the same orbit as Pluto were spotted, thus under the definition that a planet must clear its orbit fails. Second if kilobytes are so clear and unambiguous, why do hard drive manufacturers consider them 1000 bytes when all computer scientists and programmers consider them 1024? http://www.glyphtech.com/suppo...

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[I'm New Around Here]

2) 'Kilo' is the metric prefix for 1000, not 1024. There already was confusion between an OS's kilobyte and a storage manufacturer's kilobyte. Kibibyte is a lame hack to try to instill some semblance of binary order in a scenario where marketing will trump all such efforts.

Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes. It has been a while though.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting.

Thank you, you are most considerate. :^)

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[ackthpt]

the guys who run the telescopes decided to start calling Pluto a dwarf planet

NO.

Some guys decided to start calling it a Dwarf Planet, after pretty much everyone else attending the IAU had gone home. They conspired to hold a meeting, without a full quorum and voted these BS standards into place. As disgusting a fixing of science as any effing millionaire/billionaire trying to rewrite school textbooks with whatever they personally would rather the youth of the nation end up spouting.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Minwee]

But you don't have a problem with Ceres no longer being a planet?

Typical orbitist prejudice.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[jeffmflanagan]

It sounds like you can't handle change. Pluto doesn't fit the definition of a planet. It's that simple.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Tim the Gecko]

19th Century: Saying "We changed our mind and decided that Ceres isn't a planet" is bad. Just say that Ceres and Pallas and Vesta and Hyperion and ... and ... and ... and ... are planets and be done with it.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Valdrax]

The whole "We changed our mind and decided that Pluto isn't a planet" is bullshit. Just say that Pluto and Eris are both planets and be done with it.

Define "planet" in a meaningful, non-arbitrary way that does not include dozens of other bodies not traditionally recognized as planets in our solar system (e.g. Ceres). It's believed the Kuiper belt has hundreds of dwarf planets. You want to promote them all just to not have to give up a mnemonic from childhood?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[the eric conspiracy]

Sure. All objects named after the God of The Underworld and radioactive elements Shalt Be Planets.

It's not arbitrary either because I say so.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Xenx]

Because it's a truthful lie to make the drives look bigger, as was pointed out in the link you provided. The sole cause of confusion, was marketing people wanting to pad their products stats. This could all of been solve quickly in the beginning by firmly defining kilobytes(etc) and forcing manufacturers to uphold truth in advertising.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Waffle Iron]

Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes. It has been a while though.

Do you mean floppy disk manufacturers, who thought that a megabyte = 1000*1024?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Opportunist]

But ... wouldn't damnation be fitting with something named Pluto?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Arker]

Why is it so hard for you aspyrons to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on context?

In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Opportunist]

Pluto IS a planet. By the very definition of planet, deriving from the Greek aster planetes, meaning "wandering star". And it is about as much a wandering star as any other planet.

So either it is a planet or none of the other planets it a planet. Make your choice.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Opportunist]

I have no problem with Ceres being a planet, too.

What is that bickering about calling some rocks planets and not others? Do they get some kind of government pension for being planets like them being some sort of veterans or what's the big deal?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[geekoid]

So the experts need to STFU so a non expert like yourself can feel good about their childhood? You are the one who needs to STFU.

"Pluto was a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time."
What definition? Pluto was call a planet when anything going around the sun was a planet; which was fine/. Now that we have learned a lot more it turns out that was a poor way to determine what a planet is.

Now there are specific requirement as to what a planet is, if it turns out the Pluto meets those requirements then t will be a planet.

" and technical use"
except it didn't. It was a useless term.

Kilo equaled a thousand before there where computers. the Computer industry incorrectly co=opted the name, and that was fixed in 1998.
kibibytes only makes an accurate definition.
I'm sorry you are too stupid to understand logical changes, and corrected definitions based on new data.
Really, nothing should change form how you learned it the first time, right?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[geekoid]

a kilobyte means 1000 bytes. A kibi means 1024 bytes.
Since binary is powers of 2., anyone who actually understand computers understand why kibi byte is more accurate and proper for the industry.

"...used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes"
No, it wan't correct, they where wrong Since it was how you used it when you learned it., you are emotional unable to come to terms with the accurate version.

And the name kibi is the result of decades of confusion, and concern that is old then the PC.

No, no, you keep assuming the manufactures are correct, because hell, why use logic and science when companies are always correct?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[geekoid]

Well, that's a complete lie.
Moron

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[geekoid]

He calls him self an Astrophysicist.

I lie how you need to make shit up, deride a man with excellent credentials, and make fun of planetariums.

You are a fucker, and it's people like you that's killing science in America.

You don't need to discover a planet to be an astronomer, and Tyson had NOTHING TO DO WIT THE DEFINITION OF WHAT A PLANET IS, understand?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Opportunist]

Anything that orbits the Sun directly in a fairly circular orbit is a planet. Why shouldn't Ceres be one?

And with stuff like Wikipedia, who the hell needs to remember something like that? If you really need to do a classification, go for the time of their discovery, i.e. split them up in 3 groups, the "ancient" ones (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Satur), the "modern" ones (Uranus, Ceres, Neptune) and the "new" ones (everything since).

Where's the big deal?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[dotgain]

A serial communications link would fit 'binary context' in my opinion. However, on a serial comms link, a megabit is 1,000,000 bits. An 8 bit data bus clocked at 1 MHz can shift 1,000,000 bytes of data per second. Again, this is very much in 'binary context'.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[geekoid]

kilo = 1000. From before computer existed. You may not have realized it, but 1000x1024 produces a completely different number then 1024x1024. I know, shocking.
So to say a kilo is 1024 in the computer industry is inaccurate and misleading.
What we need was a name for 1024, which we now have.

Are you seriously saying we should re-define the metric system?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[ChromaticDragon]

If you believe there's some pedantic reason to keep Pluto as a planet, I have to ask whether you hold the same views regarding Ceres.

Ceres was "a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time".

The circumstances surrounding demotion of Ceres and Pluto are rather similar. The timeframe either of the two were considered planets is also similar.

Now, what I find more interesting BOTH for this issue of Eris and Pluto and the argument over Planet classification is to look at MASS instead of diameter:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Look at this chart of bodies in our Solar System ranked by mass in a logarithmic chart. The eight planets unambiguously rank as the largest bodies. Eris still is more massive than Pluto. And all the dwarf planets are outranked by several moons.

Yes definitions are arbitrary. But the eight planets stand apart. It does make sense to align definitions to match such. In any case, the definitions OUGHT to be consistent. What criteria other than inertia of publications would you prefer that keeps Pluto IN yet leaves Ceres OUT?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Anonymous Coward]

So the experts need to STFU so a non expert like yourself can feel good about their childhood? You are the one who needs to STFU.

"Pluto was a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time."
What definition? Pluto was call a planet when anything going around the sun was a planet; which was fine/. Now that we have learned a lot more it turns out that was a poor way to determine what a planet is.

Now there are specific requirement as to what a planet is, if it turns out the Pluto meets those requirements then t will be a planet.

" and technical use"
except it didn't. It was a useless term.

Kilo equaled a thousand before there where computers. the Computer industry incorrectly co=opted the name, and that was fixed in 1998.
kibibytes only makes an accurate definition.
I'm sorry you are too stupid to understand logical changes, and corrected definitions based on new data.
Really, nothing should change form how you learned it the first time, right?

^^^ This is just how I would react if I was a Pluto denier/terrorist.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[ackthpt]

Well, that's a complete lie.
Moron

How is it a lie?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[S.O.B.]

Don't forget, they also redefined the term Astronomer when they started letting Tyson call himself an Astronomer. The man is a shameless self-promoter and a director of a planetarium, not an observatory. A planetarium where they do laser light shows for stoners to Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd music. Unlike some true astronomers who actually discovered a planet, Tyson's planet discovery count is negative one. That's why I prefer to call him a "dwarf astronomer".

Tyson's profiles at the Hayden Planetarium and the Planetary Society (where he is a board member) refer to him as an astrophysicist and astrophysics is a branch of astronomy. If other people refer to him as an astronomer, dwarf or otherwise, that's their mistake but he clearly identifies himself as an astrophysicist.

And yes he does do a lot of media appearances but so did Carl Sagan in his day.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[AthanasiusKircher]

Why is it so hard for you aspyrons to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on context?

Well, maybe because almost all the international standards organizations actually agree that there's a single meaning now (even though they disagreed in the past).

In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?

Look, what the GP said was factually accurate:

the IEEE, ISO and SI standards all agree that kilobyte means 1000 bytes, and megabyte means 1000000 bytes.

The IEC adopted these in 1998, leading to full adoption by the IEEE in 2005. SI explicitly defines kilo ONLY to mean 1000, and though bytes are not technically SI units, they regard any other use of the prefixes as incorrect.

The only large body that has endorsed the use of your system in the past decade is JEDEC, though they insist on capital letters, i.e., K, M, and G, instead of the standard SI lower-case. So, a kilobyte (kB) to them is actually 1000 bytes, while a Kilobyte (KB or K) is 1024.

Recently, if you read even JEDEC's standards from 2012, you'll note that they quote the IEEE standards and say the older style "frequently leads to confusion and is deprecated."

So, I don't know about the GP, but my "excuse" for following standard SI style is that basically all international standards bodies agree that "kilo" means 1000, and if you want to have a term for 1024, you should use something else.

Now, the reality of the world is that many hardware manufacturers and such still retain older deprecated usages. But GP's statement was basically accurate. There's no reason to go around insulting people when they state factual information.

You want to keep using a standard that has confused people for decades when the international standards organizations deprecate it because it's confusing? That's your choice. But what's your excuse for attacking people?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Jeremy Erwin]

Don't forget Sedna and Quaoar. and Makemake, and Varuna and...

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[wonkey_monkey]

a kilobyte means 1000 bytes.

That depends on what you think "means" means.

If I told a room full of people with a background in IT that my file was exactly one kilobyte, I'm pretty sure the vast majority would take me to mean, sans further information, 1024 bytes.Yes, kibibyte is unambiguous. But in most circumstances it's not that helpful to start throwing around obscure terms for the sake of avoiding the slim possibility of misinterpretation.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[wonkey_monkey]

a mnemonic from childhood?

Mary's "Virgin" Excuse Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbour.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[cheesybagel]

Some people know that human language is context sensitive and adjust their expectations of meaning conforming to context. WTF is wrong with KB meaning 1024 bytes? The only problem was hard disk manufacturers and their BS propaganda. No one else uses their definition.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[AthanasiusKircher]

But in most circumstances it's not that helpful to start throwing around obscure terms for the sake of avoiding the slim possibility of misinterpretation.

"Slim possibility"? Seriously? Some hardware types use the 1024 definition, while others use the 1000 definition. When talking about data transfer speed and other contexts "kilo" means 1000. (Bits, despite being the ultimate binary unit, seem to come in 1000s, while groups of 8 of them come in 1024s -- why?) Some software and OSes use 1024 (e.g. Windows); others use 1000 (e.g. many commands in Linux).

Yes, it's possible to navigate all these conflicting standards to have a general sense of when the prefix means one thing or the other. But it's hardly unambiguous to say "kilobyte" without knowing the context, and if you think otherwise, you're either ignorant or in denial. It would be much more efficient for the prefix always just to mean the same thing... and basically all international standards bodies agree.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[khallow]

In any case, the definitions OUGHT to be consistent. What criteria other than inertia of publications would you prefer that keeps Pluto IN yet leaves Ceres OUT?

The whole argument is retarded because it can't be extended to other star systems (many which don't have the nice structure of our Solar System). Currently, we have a naming scheme with "planets", "dwarf planets", and "exoplanets", yet only one of these three groups actually are planets. Please continue to lecture us on "consistency".

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[cheesybagel]

Who says we are interested in leaving Ceres out? I'm fine with keeping both in and Eris too for that matter.

If the IAU is too lazy to come up with names for the planets just call them 1,2,3,4,5,6,7... SOL-3. That sounds good.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[AthanasiusKircher]

The only problem was hard disk manufacturers and their BS propaganda. No one else uses their definition.

Well, only them and just about every international standards body that actually defines units, including engineering and electronics bodies (e.g. IEEE, JEDEC still allows something like the old 1024 standard, but notes it is deprecated).

Also, various other hardware manufacturers, various software (e.g. many Linux commands), data transfer rates and other things measured in bits rather than bytes, etc., etc.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[cheesybagel]

Because the definition of what is a planet changed. For no good reason at all.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[cheesybagel]

Its as arbitrary as declaring Pluto not to be a planet.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[cheesybagel]

Yes! Why shouldn't it be a planet too. It costs the same.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Valdrax]

Anything that orbits the Sun directly in a fairly circular orbit is a planet. Why shouldn't Ceres be one?

Do comets count? How "off" of an orbit do you have to be not to count (and yet for Pluto to count).

Where's the big deal?

Where's the big deal in Pluto not being a planet?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Xenx]

Just because some people use the newer naming convention doesn't make either one wrong/right(better/worse). They should of codified kilobytes(etc) earlier on, before it actually became an issue. The standards from the IEC didn't come into place until after the non-codified standard was entrenched. There was no reason to change it, aside from sticking their nose in things. It was a well understood naming convention for the number of bytes. To prevent the people(marketing departments) from abusing the situation, they could of used the defacto standard as the official standard.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Waffle Iron]

WTF is wrong with KB meaning 1024 bytes?

If it were just KB, that would only be somewhat annoying and confusing, like US vs imperial pints.

But when you introduce binary MB and GB they all have to be mixed, and it becomes absolutely infuriating. It makes doing the math to figure out how much stuff will fit on a drive almost as hard as using Roman numerals.

You're basically changing the radix of your numbers depending on their magnitude, for no good reason. (Disk drives have never had any capacity factor physically based on any power of two.) That's just stupid.

I can't fathom why some people get so angry because they think that drive manufacturers are trying to cheat them out of a couple of percent capacity, when it's been common knowledge for decades. But for some reason these same people don't mind having to break out a calculator to help them do what would often otherwise be trivial mental arithmetic.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Xtifr]

I'm actually more interested in making Ceres an official planet. Pluto's a big comet. It comes from the Kuiper belt, and doesn't really resemble anything in the inner system. I can certainly understand giving it a different classification. Ceres, on the other hand, is more similar to Mercury than Mercury is to Jupiter, and I don't see any reason at all to classify it separately.

I can see using "cleared its orbit" to separate classes of planets, so Ceres can be a dwarf planet, but "dwarf planet" should be a type of planet! It's got planet right there in the name! We could even have other classes of planet, like Gas Giant, so the whole "Mercury is classified with Jupiter instead of Ceres" nonsense would be resolved.

Frankly, I'd just as soon see them drop any mention of orbits from the definition. Why *shouldn't* Luna and Ganymede and Titan be considered planets? They'd still be moons, but there's no reason something can't fit into more than one category.

Heck, there are so many more interesting features they could have used to define categories: does it have an atmosphere? Does it have its own satellites?

The current definition is a horrible compromise designed to piss off as many people as possible, without offering anything useful. I realize it was intended to try to rock the boat as little as possible, but it hasn't even done that!

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Xtifr]

Except that only Ceres is big enough to have become a spheroid under the pressure of its own gravity. Which is actually a pretty significant feature (unlike the orbit nonsense), and a fairly solid reason for putting something in a separate category from "random rock".

Vesta was actually on the bubble for a while. Despite the big chunk missing from one side, the final decision about whether it would be a dwarf planet or asteroid wasn't made until the Dawn mission gave us a better close-up look.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[DanielRavenNest]

In fact, actual astronomers refer to all the solid objects that orbit the Sun as "planets". The come in three sizes: major planet, dwarf planet, and minor planet. The IAU Minor Planet Center ( http://www.minorplanetcenter.n... ) tracks all those things otherwise known as "asteroids".

The exact dividing lines are:

Major Planet - Round, and massive enough to have "cleared" it's orbit of other large object (it's the dominant mass in it's orbital region)
Dwarf Planet - Round, but has not cleared it's orbit, thus Ceres and Pluto fall into this category.
Minor Planet - Too small to become round under it's own gravity.

As a note, the stuff that got "cleared" falls into three groups: impacted one of the other planets and got absorbed, kicked entirely out of the Solar System, or kicked into an eccentric orbit but not ejected. That last group is called the "Scattered Disk", and there are around 400 known objects in the category. They are separate from the Kuiper Belt, which is leftovers in the outer Solar System which have not really been moved in their orbits. There are about 1200 objects in the Kuiper Belt, inlcuing Pluto.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Zynder]

OMG!! It is supposed to be: Mary's Virgin Excuse Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbour's PENIS!

PLUTO- NEVER FORGET!

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[killhour]

When we're talking about small files, it's not a huge deal. However, when we get into enterprise-level storage, you damn-well better be unambiguous. For instance, I design security systems for a living. If I have a customer with 100 1080p cameras that wants to retain video for at least a year at standard settings (8 FPS, H.264 encoding, 30% compression) recording 24/7, I would need to give them roughly 1 PB of storage. 1 PB of storage (1,000,000,000,000,000 bytes) is not even REMOTELY close to 1 PiB of storage (1,125,899,906,842,624 bytes). If I tell my supplier to give me a SAN with 1 PB of storage when I REALLY mean 1 PiB of storage, I'm going to be ~126TB short. That's a 5-figure screw-up that's going to come out of my paycheck (well, they'd probably just fire me, but you get the idea).

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[DanielRavenNest]

> Do comets count?

The distinction between comets and asteroids is no longer scientifically valid. By composition, comets and outer Solar System bodies are the same. Comets just happen to have orbits that get so close to the Sun they evaporate water and other ices and create a tail. There are intermediate bodies in the asteroid belt and out to about Saturn that give off just a little outgassing, but not enough to create a full tail. "Dead comets" have comet-like orbits, but no longer have any volatiles to outgas, and so are indistinguishable from asteroids otherwise.

The modern way to distinguish these small Solar System bodies is:

- Never got close to the Sun, and still has all the volatiles (water, methane, etc.)
- Sometimes gets close to the Sun, and still boils off volatiles when it does
- Has spent too much time close to the Sun, and has been baked dry.

Those are verbose descriptions, so I like to borrow from steak terminology and call them Raw, Still Juicy, and Overcooked.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Kjella]

But if you asked those same people how big one second of CD music (44.1 kHz, 16 bits/sample) is how many would answer 88.2 kB instead of ~86.13 kB? And how long does it take to transfer 100 MB over a 100 Mbit Ethernet connection, excluding overhead? Hint: If you answer 8 seconds, you're off by about 0.39 seconds. Really if you're on such a low level that the distinction matters, most people in IT would get it wrong. Personally I find the abbreviations useful for clarity, but I refuse to use the silly names. If I absolutely need to be precise verbally I'd use "binary kilobit", "decimal kilobit" or "base 2/10 kilobit" before I ever used kibibit.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[rossdee]

Does the IAU even have jurisdiction over other star systems definitions of planets? Since they (the IAU) don't even live in the other systems. I think its up to the (aliens that live there) to name them.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[gmhowell]

If other people refer to him as an astronomer, dwarf or otherwise, that's their mistake but he clearly identifies himself as an astrophysicist.

I could refer to myself as the God Emperor of Arrakis, it doesn't make it so. Everyone knows that titles are only properly given by moistened bints tossing scimitars.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[gmhowell]

Interesting moderation. I guess someone changed the definition of 'troll' while I wasn't looking.

Either that or your gored someone's sacred cow.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[khallow]

Does the IAU even have jurisdiction over other star systems definitions of planets?

Yes.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[swillden]

Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes.

No, you don't.

The earliest mass storage devices all used powers of 10 definitions, just like hard drives do today. With very few exceptions that was the consistent approach up until the introduction of the floppy disk. When 8" floppies hit the market, IBM stuck with powers of 10, but DEC began using powers of two. When 5.25" floppies showed up all of the manufacturers -- including IBM -- had shifted to powers of two. This made sense because they all had sector sizes that were powers of two.

But then came 3.5" floppies. The double density disks stuck with nice powers of two -- 320 KB, 640 KB and 720 KB were 320*1024, 640*1024 and 720*1024, respectively. But then came high density, starting with the "1.44 MB" disk, which actually had 1.44 * 1000 * 1024 bytes. The 2.88 MB disk followed this same bizarre pattern.

Meanwhile, hard disk drives continued consistently using powers of 10, though almost always with a little rounding.

So, no, you don't remember when storage manufacturers used "the correct definition", unless by "correct definition" you mean the same one used today, and you're talking specifically about HDDs.

BTW, RAM wasn't always consistently measured with powers of two either. Various manufacturers made different choices. They eventually all settled on powers of two because otherwise they couldn't fully utilize the address lines. If you have 1000 words of memory you still need 10 address lines to address them all, so you might as well have 1024 words. The same applies to chip-based storage like flash and EEPROM, but not to the mechanical systems of spinning disks.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Opportunist]

The big deal with Pluto not being a planet is simply that we have to pull together a whole lot of arbitrary definitions to exclude it. Which may turn into a whole different set of nightmares (like, say, "orbital clearing". What about the Trojans? Is Jupiter no planet anymore now? Or do the other objects in the orbit have to have a certain size compared to the "main" body to be considered "negligible"? How much mass compared to the main body may they have? Or do they have to be independent (i.e. not at a Lagrange-point)? And can we actually say for sure that they're not, considering we can't calculate the mass for some KBOs sensible yet?)

Now please tell me that including Ceres and Pluto wouldn't create a much more "stable" definition of "planet".

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Gavagai80]

Ceres, as well as Eris and probably lots of other trans-neptunian objects, are large enough to have an atmosphere and revolve around the sun and not another body. Defining atmosphere is tricky too.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Gavagai80]

Distinguishing the major objects from countless minor objects is an awfully good reason. If you're labeling Pluto and Jupiter as a the same category of thing, your categorization system is hopelessly stupid.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[AthanasiusKircher]

You appear to believe that argument from authority trumps sense. You have it backwards.

First off, I was merely pointing out that GP's statements were factually accurate, and therefore did not deserve ridicule. I said you have the choice to ignore those recommendations by standards organizations if you want. Go ahead. But if you want to argue from a system of logic rather than authority, you may want to reconsider your methods.

Secondly, you have it backwards and believe in some mythical authority that never was consistent. If you actually were correct about 1024 being used in ALL cases of binary standards, you might at least have a leg to stand on. But that's simply not the case -- the system is inconsistently applied and has been from the start.

To put it another way, even if you got every committee of busy-bodies on the planet to agree that 2+2=3, they and you would still be wrong.

Not if I were running a "three-legged race"! You see: even 2+2 depends on context! See what I did there? That's your logic in a nutshell. But the situations that 2+2=3 are relatively rare and hard to define as a specific class, so we all agree to be CONSISTENT and accept that 2+2=4 as a DEFINITION, and regard the "three-legged race" as a different thing, not something that trumps the standard definition of 2+2=4. Binary prefixes are needed enough that we need a system to reference them, and one has been defined. Just about everyone in the "biz" these days is aware of it. What's your excuse?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Shadowmist]

If you believe there's some pedantic reason to keep Pluto as a planet, I have to ask whether you hold the same views regarding Ceres.

This would not be a discussion if Pluto was not the only "planet" to have been discovered by an American.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Cro Magnon]

It seems to me there should be a fourth category: gas giants. They are considered planets, but there's more differences between Earth and Uranus than there are between Mars and Pluto.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

It would not include Mercury, which is a planet for more than 3000 years (at least since the Babylonians defined 'planets' as those objects in the sky that change their place within the other objects).

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

The kilo was defined in 1793 (yes, more than 200 years ago) as meaning "1000 of the base unit". So how much earlier do you want the 1024 be defined? And which is the "newer" definition?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

Because you never know what you might discover next. Pluto is not even known for 100 years yet, it differs from all other planets (which are either stone planets with a defined surface and run on orbits close to the Sun, or gas planets which run further away and don't have a defined surface), in that it is basicly a dirty snowball, much more similar to the large moons of the gas planets, its orbit is so different from a circular one, that it crosses the orbit of Neptune, and while all other planets stay pretty much in the plane of the Earth orbit, Pluto's orbit is quite slanted.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

Which makes every comet and every asteroid and the Moon and the Sun planets too - they are also wandering stars, moving around the other objects in the sky. And with the stellar system moving around the center of the Galaxy every 26000 years, every other star and all other Galaxies are wandering stars too.

Sometimes, a definition really loses its meaning if applied too literally.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

Hm... What have Mars and Pluto in common?

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

But then you discover a group of objects of which half of them barely meet your criterion, and the others just don't. And then one half are planets, and the others which don't differ in anything from the first ones except not meeting an arbitrary limit, aren't planets.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

Because there wasn't a definition of "planet" before (except member of the {Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto} set), there was no definition that could have changed.

By the way, there was a time, when it was the {Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus} set, as Ceres was discovered in 1801, and Neptune in 1846. Ceres got thrown out, and Neptune was included. And no one was complaining about arbitrarily changing a non-existant definition.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Sique]

Mimas is much smaller than Ceres and it is spherical. The only reason Mimas is not a planet is, because it's a moon. So it would be quite possible that we discover spherical objects (or at least objects in hydrostatical equilibrum, as even Jupiter or Saturn are not spherical) which are much smaller than Ceres and not orbiting a planet.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[butalearner]

It seems to me there should be a fourth category: gas giants. They are considered planets, but there's more differences between Earth and Uranus than there are between Mars and Pluto.

To add to the confusion, Uranus and Neptune are sometimes considered "ice giants," since their composition is so significantly different than Jupiter and Saturn.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Arker]

Your claim that the GPs statement was "factually correct" and your acknowledgement that standards committees are not actually authoritative contradict each other.

The link you posted is actually not that bad an essay on the subject, although I disagree with his conclusions at least he's mostly accurate and aboveboard on his logic.

But you are completely misunderstanding me if you think I am appealing to any nonexistent authority or denying that people use these terms in confusing and incorrect ways on a regular basis, and have for a very long time. The interface between communications and computing equipment was an inevitable rough spot since the communications guys were already working with base-10 from pre-computing times, and HDD manufacturers have been fond of lying about their capacities as long as I can remember. But the fact that people misuse language does not make their misuse correct, what an absurd position!

In essence the main difference between my position and the one you linked is that he prefers to use Ki/K where I would use K/k. Sorry, "kibi"  is nonsense and I do not favor inventing words where perfectly good words already exist. Nor do I favor abandoning correct usage simply because it's become unpopular. You may have a different opinion on those issues and you have a right to that, but you dont have a right to force me to agree.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[jafac]

Ah yes.. Eris. Let us STRIVE over it.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[jafac]

No.

The big deal with Pluto not being a planet, is that it was discovered by an American, and Americans are butthurt over losing the "credit" for discovering a Planet.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[jafac]

and toss Ceres, Eris, and a couple dozen other big rocks

Nobody tosses a dwarf!

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Opportunist]

Ok, you win with Sun and Moon. Though I'd say the movement of an object has to be observable within sensible time spans, i.e. stars don't really "move" with respect to a human lifetime.

Aside of that I'd have to concede. But the current definition of planet is not useful either, since "clearing the orbit" is a term that has been applied very arbitrarily. Or, to quote Stern, leader of the New Horizon Mission, "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wasn't there". Add some Trojans and NEAs and Jupiter and even Earth lose their planet status according to this definition.

I'd prefer a simpler definition, with fewer exceptions, buts and ifs.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Opportunist]

I don't give a shit who discovered it. I have to admit, until now I didn't even know who discovered it.

I'm not an American (by neither definition). My reason to want to include Pluto (and, for that matter, Ceres) in the list of planets is that it would create a simpler, more elegant definition of planet that is less dependent on future discoveries. With the current definition (especially the "cleared the orbit" bit), planets are just planets so long 'til we find something in their orbit that they haven't cleared out.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[AthanasiusKircher]

You may have a different opinion on those issues and you have a right to that, but you dont have a right to force me to agree.

Absolutely. I acknowledged that in both of my replies to you. My main beef was mainly with the lack of respect and civility -- you want to disagree? Fine. But in doing so, you accused GP of being like hardware manufacturers who deliberately sought to confuse people, and implicitly dismissed the citations of major international standards organizations who advocate the GP's position. You wanna have a different opinion? Fine. But there's no reason to go around insulting people, particularly when they cite evidence for their position.

And the fact remains that the word "kilobyte" and symbols like K, KB, kB, etc. are often used to mean different things in "binary" situations today. It is not unambiguous, nor a simple decimal/binary divide. You know why SI originally was so helpful? Not just for standardizing things internationally or for avoiding weird conversions. Also because people actually used different units to measure the same thing, often depending on the application or profession (volume measured in different units by winemakers vs beermakers vs farmers, for example). Moreover, they often used the same name for different size units in different professions or different countries or different circumstances.

The inconsistent situation in the use of "kilo" etc. is PRECISELY the thing that thing like SI were designed to prevent. And most countries in the world eventually figured out that using unambiguous terms and standardized units was worth the annoyance involved in adopting new ideas. The idea that we should have a different set of prefixes for binary powers is not a priori stupid, and there right now is not a great clear other solution for disambiguation, particularly for those not educated in the many different cases of prefix usage conventions in electronic systems.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Arker]

I think if you'll go back and read the message I initially replied to, as I have just done, you will find that the incivility started there, and I simply replied in kind. He stated without reservation that those using these prefixes intending their binary meaning simply wrong, and cited the busy-bodies as if that were proof of the contention.

If my reply was rude, so was that post, because I did nothing but mirror it back.

Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto

[Agripa]

They still do use the correct definition. Some OSes (windows in particular) do not.

And some memory manufacturers, and some processor manufacturers, and some integrated peripheral manufacturers, etc.

Let me know where 65.536 kilobit RAM or ROM in an 8.192k x 8 bit format is advertised. I am also in the market for a DMA controller which supports a 65.536 kilobyte address space.

My Very Educated Mother...

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

...Just Served Us Nine Pizzas for the first time in YEARS. We were all getting tired of her serving us Nothing.

Re:My Very Educated Mother...

[bob_super]

The problem is to add 6 words to this sentence, as of today's count

Re:My Very Educated Mother...

[uCallHimDrJ0NES]

LOL...I suspect the problem is more likely to be getting the community to accept any full new sentence. Seriously, it's pizza or nothing, man.

It's a trick

[Nimey]

Eris is a tricksy one.

Re:It's a trick

[Another, completely]

If I had points, I would vote you up. My pineal gland told me to. It also told me to pass the cheese dip, but I'm out of crackers.

Re:It's a trick

[Nimey]

There is no cilantro.

Re:It's a trick

[Shadowmist]

Actually it would be Hail, Eris full of Discord. If you're getting your mythology straight. She started both the first beauty contest, and the Trojan War as a direct result of said contest, in a fit of pique from being excluded from an Olympian social.

Re:It's a trick

[Nimey]

You have your understanding of Goddess, I have mine.

Yo Momma's so Fat.

[wisnoskij]

Her title of largest object in her neighbourhood was reclaimed by Pluto.

Re:Yo Momma's so Fat.

[mjwx]

I was once thrown out of a IAU conference for reclassifying Neil DeGrasse Tyson's mother as a dwarf planet.

Re:And when Eris' atmosphere is measured...

[butalearner]

So here's a question: since we'll have much, much better data on Pluto in just over a year when New Horizons gets there, should we even bother looking right now? New Horizons took some awesome pictures of Jupiter's moons so I'm stoked to see what it finds when it gets to Pluto, but I'm having a hard time caring about this finding in the meantime (beyond the desire to once again check out Wikipedia's list of solar system objects by size).

In Illinois Pluto is still a planet

[the_Bionic_lemming]

Pluto is still a planet in Illinois - Just thought I's toss it in :)

http://www.ilga.gov/legislation/fulltext.asp?DocName=&SessionId=76&GA=96&DocTypeId=SR&DocNum=46&GAID=10/

Definitions are for losers

[the eric conspiracy]

The day we demoted Pluto from planethood everything started going downhill fast.

First thing we had the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Then there were as series of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And a DEMOCRAT was elected President! And then there is H1N1!!.

The fact is you do not want to denigrate objects named after Gods of the Underworld. Seriously you don't mess with stuff belonging to this guy. What if he curses you with a rain of Plutonium? eh?

It's conservation of size

[Yunzil]

Mercury is getting smaller and Pluto's getting lllaarrrrger.

Re:It's conservation of size

[styrotech]

What do you make of this?

Re:It's conservation of size

[cthulhu11]

Oh I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a pterodactyl...

Re:It's conservation of size

[cthulhu11]

I hereby propose that Pluto be renamed Leon.

Re:TNOs are hard to measure accurately

[Tablizer]

They don't even know how many moons Pluto has. New Horizons is going to get there next year and...

I think they've counted around 5 so far, which is a lot of moons for such a small body such that they suspect these moons are debris from a relatively-recent collision.

This could mean that Pluto has a kind of ring and that the coming probe is doomed if it gets too near. They may decide to steer it further out, skipping close-up observations, unfortunately.

There were similar issues with the Voyager probes near Saturn as they didn't know the full extent of the rings at the time. They used the rusty Pioneer 11 probe as a guinea-pig to test the ring gaps. It really was a "pioneer", ready to take an arrow in the back for Voyager. But we don't have that luxury with New Horizons.

bogus claim

[frovingslosh]

By that logic Neptune and Uranus are not visible to the naked eye, so they would not be planets either. And Mercury is never in the night sky. And Earth is never seen in the night sky. Your logic would be more damaging to the count of planets than even Tyson arbitrarily deciding that he didn't want to count Pluto as a planet and so removing it from Hayden displays.

Re:bogus claim

[Cro Magnon]

Actually, Uranus is, barely, visible to the naked eye. But most people avoided looking at it, for obvious reasons.

Pluto Regains Title

[PPH]

"I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." -- Pluto

Just call them "roughly the same size"

[YoungManKlaus]

and we are done.

Woah!!

[Arancaytar]

... aw, still not a planet. :-(

Re:And when Eris' atmosphere is measured...

[gomiam]

The New Horizons mission page states that the probe will fly by Pluto during July 2015. I don't know what the probe's ability to get data from Pluto is, but anything that helps restrict the range of observations is, IMO, a good thing: a month can pass quickly.

Re:TNOs are hard to measure accurately

[Tablizer]

it's going to pass through a space thought to be cleared out by Charon.

That's assuming most of the debris has circular orbits. If there's been recent collisions or sub-collisions, that may not be the case. But exploration of the unknown of course carries risk.

Fortunately, the moon orbits look relatively circular, which suggests the environment has had time to settle.