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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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

[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]

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

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

[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

[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

[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.

It's a trick

[Nimey]

Eris is a tricksy one.

It's conservation of size

[Yunzil]

Mercury is getting smaller and Pluto's getting lllaarrrrger.