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One Astronomer's Quest To Reinstate Pluto As a Planet
sarahnaomi writes: Most of us grew up believing that tiny, distant Pluto was the outermost planet in our solar system. Then, one day, the scientific powers that be decreed that it wasn't. But it seems the matter is far from settled. David Weintraub—who describes Pluto's exile as a stunt organized by a "very small clique of Pluto-haters"—would have the dwarf world rejoin the ranks of our Solar System's fully-fledged planets today. But solid evidence that Pluto deserves the title may come in July, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft slingshots around the icy rock and sends us back a detailed picture of its composition. Pluto's planethood was revoked by majority vote on the final day of the 2006 IAU conference. Over 2,500 astronomers attended the meeting throughout the week, but only 394 votes ultimately decided Pluto's fate: 237 in favor of demoting the planet and 157 against.
Don't make it sound so sinister. The vote wasn't to demote Pluto. It was a vote to settle on the criteria an astronomical body must meet in order to be a planet. This was necessary because we've found more Pluto like bodies, and chances are we'll find more in the decades to follow.
How many exoplanets pass the current IAU definition of 'planet'? I bet a bunch don't.
I would bet that every single one of them does. Current exoplanet detection techniques are only sensitive to the big ones in close orbits. To detect something as small as Pluto, in a distant orbit in which it might not have cleared its orbital zone of debris (and so not be a planet, by the IAU definition), is well beyond our current capabilities.
Exactly. There are many categories of planets, including but not limited to:
* Terrestrial planets
* Gas giants
* Ice giants
* Hot jupiters
* Superearths
And so forth. Why does the concept of another category, dwarfs, enrage people?
Really, the only categorization issue that I'm adamant about is that Pluto-Charon is called a binary. The Pluto-Charon barycentre is not inside Pluto, therefore Charon is not rotating around Pluto, the two are corotating around a common point of space between them. That's a binary.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
I before E except after C.
What a weird and foreign rule, with so many exceptions from the exception. A scietifically-minded species such as ours should have been sufficiently intelligent to create a more efficient spelling system than this. Let's just hope that future generations seize the opportunity to get rid of this ancient and inefficient spelling rule.