Slashdot Mirror
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 Pluto's planethood was revoked by majority vote on the final day of the 2006 IAU conference.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.
Does this guy want to consider a bunch of other Trans-Neptunian objects as planets too? Because if he doesn't, he's probably either letting nostalgia or some other emotional attachment cloud his judgment. I don't mind having a half-dozen more "planets", but I'm sure my kids might get annoyed at having to remember all of their names.
As far as I'm concerned, if it's gravitation is enough to pull it into a sphere, it's a planet. Yes, I'm happy counting Luna and a bunch of other satellites. Let's face it, "Believing" has nothing to do with it. We grew up "choosing to label" Pluto as a planet.
How many exoplanets pass the current IAU definition of 'planet'? I bet a bunch don't.
********* sig: If you don't like the law, get filthy stinking rich, and buy a better one.
By any definition, it's either the 8 we have now, or 10 or 11. That's what started the Pluto mess, we discovered things bigger than Pluto way far out.
Neither does Jupiter. There are about 100,000 trojan asteroids in Jupiter's orbit, so it fails the third criteria; "cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."
In fact... Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune all fail to meet that criteria.
The definition of "planet" is a fucked up mess that a small group of astronomers threw together with the intent of classifying Pluto as not-a-planet without really thinking it through.
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.
Pluto got what it had coming. It knows what it did.
If Pluto self-identifies as a planet then we should respect Pluto's choice.
If that mission is worth a crusade:
I now wish I had a death star I could fly to Pluto and blast it to pieces!
1) Calling the entitled, greedy rich "Neptunecrats" doesn't sound right.
2) Percival Lowell!
In fact... Most astronomers counter this opinion by saying that, far from not having cleared their orbits, the major planets completely control the orbits of the other bodies within their orbital zone.
It's a bit weird that the leading paragraph exists in both articles, while the counterpoint doesn't, but there you go.
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.
How dare you challenge the might of Jupiter! It weighs 320 times the mass of Earth -- even if those 100,000 trojan asteroids weighed as much as its minor moons (which they don't, they are 0.0001 Earth masses according to wikipedia), it would still dominate its gravitational field by several (9) orders of magnitude.
Compare that to Pluto: Charon already weighs 10% of Plutos mass. The center of rotation in that system is not even inside Pluto.
Also, there are other criteria that apply: a planet has to be spherical due to gravitation (there is a more technical definition). Is that the case for Pluto?
Finally, you can not have 9 planets anymore. You can choose between 8 planets and 13 planets, the latter group growing every year.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
The efforts of a very small clique of Pluto-haters within the International Astronomical Union (IAU) plutoed Pluto in 2006
Yeah, that's right. They were "Pluto-haters". Not just people who happened to hold a different opinion he doesn't agree with.
That's not to say that you have to agree with their position, nor the way they went about having Pluto stripped of its status. But to ascribe their actions to the fact they personally "hated" Pluto- rather than simply believing that it couldn't justify its status as a planet- is somewhat childish.
I don't know if he meant "haters" in present-day sense (i.e. with its "haters gonna hate" connotations et al), but I've always had contempt for that usage. It's a cheap and easy way to counter anyone you don't agree with, to depersonalise and dismiss them in as people who hate purely because they're "haters". To make it a personal beef and a partisan issue rather than one of simple disagreement on a particular matter- one which would require legitimately addressing what they're actually saying instead of trying to puff yourself up in the cod-macho bullshit "them versus us/me" manner of an adolescent who's either immature enough to see things in that light, or has nothing to say beyond the convenient "haters gonna hate".
Seriously, step away from the gangsta rap and stop acting like a f*****g fourteen-year-old.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Ceres is also a dwarf planet. An increasingly interesting one at that. Really I find it pretty amazing that space exploration has practically ignored such a large, nearby body with tons of launch windows up to this point.
You know when it's okay to shout fire in a crowded theatre? When it's on fire.
Even people in science careers are not immune to significant irrationality (I know, hardly Earth-shattering news).
When my grandmother was young, there were only eight planets, plus a few largish asteroids, then someone discovered another. As our instruments improved, we found many, many more "wanderers". We also learned how how their composition varied, and that there were more-descriptive categories to apply to the various bodies not only in this stellar system, but others.
It is utterly irrational to continue to collect Pluto into the same category as the eight other major rocky/gassy/icy Sol-orbiting bodies (the traditional "planets"), and NOT include the dozens of KBOs, TNOs, etc. that also orbit Sol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Solar_System.
Yet still our best telescopes can barely make out its shape.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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.
The barycenter of the Sun-Jupiter system lies at 1.068 solar radii, outside the Sun. Do you think they should be called a binary?
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
"Planet" originally meant a star which moved through the constellations. The concept of size or distance or mass was utterly irrelevant. Having "categories" of planets, particularly given that there were less than a dozen examples, was a ludicrious suggestion.
It still is. There are still less than a dozen planets that can even be halfway considered observed to the point of resolved, much less understood. The idea that humans have somehow categorised these objects is as absurd as it is untenable.
There is no definition of a planet. And, given the people currently in charge of the study of them, there probably never will be.
Here's an analogy I gave my students last week...
Imagine you're an alien and you land on Earth in front of a pet store. You go inside and you start meeting dogs. Some are big with a loud deep "WOOF", some are small with a quieter higher "ruff" and there's one little one that goes "meow". Some of them have big floppy ears, some of them have little floppy ears, and that little one has sharp pointed ears with tufts on the end. You think "That little meowing dog with the pointed tufted ears is an unusual dog!"
Then you go onto the rest of the pet store and find a whole bunch more small meowing things with pointed tufted ears, and you say "Oh... I see. That wasn't a funny dog, that was just the first cat I met!"
Pluto was the first Trans-Neptunian Object we met, and so we originally called it by our existing language ("planet"). But once we had a much better lay of the land, it became clear that it was just the first example of a quite different type of object.
[TMB]
Jupiter emits more heat into space than it receives from the Sun.
(I agree with you, just playing devil's advocate).
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Tomatoes are axiomatic components of both pizza sauce and spaghetti sauce. You fuck with tomatoes, you are fucking with the fundamental forces that hold the universe together. Back the fuck off before you do something we'll all regret.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Anyone who made that definition could just move the arbitrary line of "too small" and remove the classification of the Earth as a planet. That's part of the complaint. The rules are all completely arbitrary.
Learn to love Alaska
As far as I'm concerned, ... no one cares anyway. :) The important thing is *I* know what to think when I learn about something "out there." And Pluto? Pluto is definitely a planet. If someone convinces me that these ideas are inconsistent, I'll do my best to fix 'em so they aren't.
We see articles about how few people are scientifically literate, and so many on Slashdot decry "We are geeks, we understand science!"
Appearently, nope!
Scientists, the astronomers who spend their days and nights studying the stars and planets, people who are intimately familiar with the definitions, and people whose life work and career funding depend on them, came up with a set of definitions.
The definitions draw a line somewhere, and you can argue they are as arbitrary as a meter and a kilogram, or a foot and a pound. You can spend your days arguing that the measuring stick is the wrong size, or spend your days convincing the rest of the world that they need a different measuring stick, or otherwise be a nay-sayer and contradict the consensus of the scientists.
But to decry that because you learned something one way, therefore that convinces you forever, that's just plain stupid.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
That's the thing. This definition includes Pluto but it also includes Ceres, the largest asteroid. It also includes Eris (of course since Eris is even larger than Pluto, any definition of a planet that includes Pluto must also include Eris). And it includes at least six to eight Kuiper Belt objects like Quaoar (the scrabble world whose name I've almost certainly misspelled). Plus a couple of scattered disk objects like Sedna which seem to just be out there in weir, random-looking orbits would also have to be included.
And this list would only grow as better telescopes and better survey techniques are developed. Here I think is the real reason that Pluto was demoted. Because it's easier to take it off of the list of planets than to include dozens of small, icy worlds.
Does this