NASA's New Horizons Shows Pluto's Moon Charon Is a Strange, New World

MarkWhittington writes: NASA's New Horizons has returned a stunning series of images of Pluto, the dwarf planet that resides on the edge of the solar system, revealing a strange new world of ice mountains and glaciers of frozen nitrogen. NASA also released images of Pluto's largest moon Charon. Scientists expected a plain ball of rock pockmarked with craters, but what they saw was anything but plain and monotonous.

Comments

Re:Can we get back

[Mal-2]

We can, when you're willing to call Vesta, Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, Eris, Sedna, Sila-Nunam, Varuna, Quaoar, Ocrus, Ixion, and likely hundreds of other objects of similar size to Pluto (yet to be identified, as the Kuiper Belt and scattered disc are large search spaces) planets as well.

In order to retain the use of the word "planet" in a context that is relatively closely related to its historical usage, a line has to be drawn somewhere. It is far more logical to draw that line above Pluto than below it. If you are advocating for every object which is large enough to pull itself into hydrostatic equilibrium by gravity, and is not in orbit around another non-stellar object a planet -- you're going to have upwards of 100 of them, and that's just what we know of right now.