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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
It turns out that Earth is not a planet. Asteroid 2016 H03, first spotted on April 27, 2016, by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii, is a companion of Earth, too distant to be considered a true satellite.
"Since 2016 HO3 loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun, we refer to it as a quasi-satellite of Earth," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Asteroid 2016 H03 is proof that Earth has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Therefore, under the definition of a planet vigorously defended by the IAU [International Astronomical Union] since the adoption of Resolution 5A on August 24, 2006, Earth is a 'dwarf planet' because it has not cleared its orbit, which is the only criteria of their definition that Pluto fails. (I think we'll eventually discover that very few of the 'planets' have cleared their orbits).
Most of us who were baffled by the IAUs declaration and outraged at the obvious discrimination of Pluto knew there was something wrong, even if we couldn't put our finger on it — we just 'knew' Pluto was a planet, right?
[...] Here's what all of us non-scientists intuitively understood all along: "A planet is defined as an astronomical body that "has not undergone nuclear fusion, and having sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape" — in other words, it's round and not on fire.
How could the distinguished scientists be so wrong?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 3, Interesting) by melikamp on Monday April 03 2017, @07:00PM (21 children)
Is there going to be a link to a white paper, written by a scientist, even if a citizen scientist, which argues for this interpretation? Here are some of the "neighborhood clearing" criteria in use, which one of them is violated, and by how much?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood#Criteria [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by massa on Monday April 03 2017, @07:22PM (13 children)
There is the one criteria that Pluto will never satisfy: having a planet-like orbit (in the ecliptic plane, not crossing other bodies' orbits, etc)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @07:51PM
Not a criteria to be a planet. Not even in the various proposed criteria at the infamous IAU meeting that caused the kerfuffle.
At the end of the day "planet" will be defined by common usage, not by any sub-group of scientists.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by number6x on Monday April 03 2017, @09:00PM (10 children)
This is not what is meant by 'cleared the neighborhood around its orbit'. If it was, planets would not be allowed to have moons.
Asteroid 2016 H03 is completely dominated by Earth's gravity. If the Earth wasn't there Asteroid 2016 H03 would be circling the sun at its own pace. In essence, Asteroid 2016 H03 orbits Earth's orbit, and its path is controlled and determined by the effects that Earth's gravity has on it. This makes it similar to asteroids in Earth's trojan points.
A better (but completely silly) argument would be that Earth, and all the other planets, have not 'cleared' their orbits because, occasionally, a comet comes in and crosses their orbits, thus 'proving' that their orbit is not cleared. It would be a very pedantic interpretation of the definition.
Just quit getting so hung up about the definition of a planet, because it is kind of arbitrary and will change depending on the group of researchers needs. Labeling and classifying things belongs to the type of science often referred to as 'butterfly collecting'. The task of labeling things and sticking them in the correct pigeon holes.
Butterfly collecting is sometimes useful. Listing chemicals by their properties led to the periodic chart. The property categories were later explained when the make up of atoms as a positively charged nucleus surrounded by 'shells' of electrons. atoms that had full shells acted in a certain way. atoms that were a few electrons short acted in their way, and atoms that had a few electrons in their next shell acted in their way. Each of these groups formed columns in the periodic table. The explanation of why the atoms exhibited their groups of behavior came long after the behavior was recorded in the periodic table.
Butterfly collecting the various groups of animals leading to Kingdom, Phyla, Class, Order, Family, Genus, and Species led to understanding of evolution and the observation how traits were passed down across generations. Some of these labels had to be re-adjusted after genetic testing was developed. Not every animal that looked alike was as closely related as thought, and some closely related animals looked different from each other. However, the 'butterfly collecting' approach was a really good first approximation.
Defining the groups of objects in the solar system is done to help us gain new insight into commonalities and differences. It is like applying a filter. You can apply this filter now, and another filter later, re-aligning the definitions.
That is what this is about, made up labels and definitions. I don't mean to imply that they are just random and arbitrary. They are meaningful and helpful. They are not just arbitrary. However, another set of meaningful and helpful definitions and labels may be useful for other purposes and lead to different insights.
(Score: 3, Informative) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 04 2017, @12:50AM
Labeling and classifying things belongs to the type of science often referred to as 'butterfly collecting'.
Labeling and classifying things belongs to the type of science often referred to as 'taxonomy'.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:30AM (7 children)
Oh come on, the article was flamebait. You're right, this asteroid does not demote Earth's status from planet to dwarf planet.
The article points up a problem. A comet crossing a planetary orbit does not change the status of a planet. Yet, planetary status does depend on external factors. Should it? I would say it should depend on external factors as little as possible. Move Pluto further out so that not only does it not cross Neptune's orbit, it is not in any resonance at all with Neptune, and what happens? Suddenly Pluto qualifies as a planet because its neighborhood is clear? That's the basic problem with the definition.
Move Earth into orbit around Jupiter, and suddenly Earth is no longer a planet, it is only a moon. Planets orbit stars or nothing. An object that orbits a planet is a moon. And that's okay. It's a useful distinction.
What about a round body too small to fuse elements in interstellar space, orbiting the galactic center rather than any star? Is that a planet? Sure it is! If Mercury gets ejected from the solar system it would not suddenly lose its status as a planet.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @05:30AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_planet [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by dry on Tuesday April 04 2017, @05:39AM (5 children)
Isn't one of the definitions of a planet that it orbits the Sun? Currently there are exactly 8 planets in the universe and if Mercury was ejected, it would no longer be a planet.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 04 2017, @06:21AM (3 children)
If you want to be extremely pedantic, there are only 5 planets: Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. The ancients could not see Uranus or Neptune, and did not realize that what they were on, the Earth, belonged in the same category as the 5 wanderers.
I do not see any useful distinction between planet and exo-planet. They all orbit suns, or are rogue planets. We've found thousands of exo-planets.
Can a planet orbit a black hole, and still be considered a planet? Why not?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 04 2017, @07:12AM (2 children)
No. They orbit stars. There are many stars, but only one of them is called sun, just like there are many planets, but only one is called earth.
It's bad enough that the term "moon", which used to be a name just for the earth moon, now has double use as both a specific body and a class of bodies. No need to add more ambiguities like that, when we already have a word for the class. What's wrong with "star"?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday April 04 2017, @12:59PM (1 child)
"sun" means the star or stars within the same solar system as the planet referred to. Sol is our sun.
Here is a pic of SUNset on Tatooine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatooine#/media/File:SW_binary_sunset.png [wikipedia.org]
"moon" is not a problem. Can call ours Luna, if "the Moon" (with capital 'M') doesn't suit.
(Score: 2) by dry on Wednesday April 05 2017, @03:56AM
Too lazy to load your link, but I didn't realize that Tatooine was close enough that the Sun was noticeable.
Just like we can talk about Sirius rise or setting (very important to the ancient Egyptians), Aliens around Sirius could talk about the Sun setting as the Sun would be one of the brighter stars in the sky.
I talk English, not Latin, and call the Sun the Sun and the Moon the Moon.
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday April 04 2017, @06:25AM
Nice catch. It looks like exoplanets are merely undefined by the IAU though:
Definition of a Planet in the Solar System [iau.org]
I also now know why the press-release incorrectly classifies Earth as a planet: it was an error in the footnote of the resolution!
(Score: 1) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Tuesday April 04 2017, @05:06PM
Well said! My personal view is that we who are amateur astronomers (and professional astronomers) should have other fish to fry and things to be concerned with than reopen the, "Pluto is a planet," argument again. But I'm comfy *either* way.
At least I do. Someone else's mileage may vary.
This sig for rent.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by butthurt on Monday April 03 2017, @10:11PM
> not crossing other bodies' orbits
It's true that Pluto crosses Neptune's orbit, but it isn't true that Neptune crosses Pluto's?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday April 03 2017, @07:33PM (2 children)
Heck, forget Earth - Jupiter hasn't cleared it's orbit either, though I suppose the Lagrange Points get special consideration.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by julian on Monday April 03 2017, @09:24PM
Can we just abandon this futile attempt at platonic essentialism? Almost everything in the Universe is describable by its place on an n-fold continuum. There is no perfect form of "planetness" that real objects conform to more or less. Pluto is a rock/ice body with a certain mass, it has certain neighbors that share it's orbit or orbit around it. It has any number of characteristics that might be interesting to study. There are an infinite number of ways to prioritize these and weight them for assessing its membership in some category humans invented.
"Planet" is a label humans use because it is useful for the daily work of astronomy and planetary science. It's a good definition if it's useful. It's a bad definition if it causes more confusion than it dispels. Pluto will continue moving about its orbit just fine no matter what you call it.
So is Pluto a planet? It depends what you're interested in studying. A geologist might say yes. An astronomer might say no. We just have to be clear which definition we are using and why.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @12:00AM
Lagrange points get the same "special consideration" as orbital resonances, such as the 1:1 resonance of "quasi-satellites" like 2016 HO3 with Earth, and 2:3 resonance like Pluto and the other plutinos have with Neptune.
Nobody serious denies that there's a useful distinction to be made between bodies such as Jupiter, which control a large region of space, and smaller bodies like asteroids and plutinos whose orbits are controlled by a nearby body in the first group, and the various criteria proposed to discriminate these classes of bodies are more in agreement than not, and all take such things into account. The disagreement is whether this classification, regarding a body's dynamical effects in relation to the rest of the solar system should be part of the definition of a planet, or whether planethood should be determined solely by properties of the body itself, and the dynamical classification should be another layer on top. (IAU tried to split the difference with "planet" and "dwarf planet", which is just a horrible naming convention.)
(Score: 2) by frojack on Monday April 03 2017, @07:38PM
even if a citizen scientist
So now we discriminate against good old home grown motherland scientists and insist on H1-B scientists!??!
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Monday April 03 2017, @07:42PM (2 children)
Apparently the author doesn't know. As he himself says in TFA:
I’m not qualified to define what ‘clearing the orbital neighborhood’ means, nor define the importance of the location of the barycenter of two bodies one orbiting the other. I only understand what most school children do, that a planet is round, and not on fire. I’ve attached an illustration.
I really don't get why people are so upset about this. Even if the criteria are not precise (though this guy admits he doesn't know enough about "clearing orbit" criteria to have a clue whether they are precise or not). it seems excluding Pluto is about the only way to get to a reasonably consistent definition that doesn't balloon the "solar system" to a huge number of planets. Right now, there are something like a hundred potential dwarf planets [wikipedia.org] that could satisfy the definition of "round and not on fire," and the estimate is that there are probably 200 in the Kuiper belt, and a LOT more beyond.
So what's his solution? He says his post is "satire" in the sense that he doesn't REALLY believe Earth is not a planet, but he doesn't propose an alternate definition that doesn't lead us to revise the definition of the "planets" in the Solar System every other week. If Pluto is so worthy of the designation, what about the other Kuiper belt objects? Or is he going to draw an arbitrary distance line from the sun? Or some other arbitrary distinction?
Also, I can't even believe I'm still giving attention to this guy, but why does he care so much about 2016 HO3? Yes, it follows an interesting orbital trajectory with Earth, but there are a bunch of near earth asteroids [wikipedia.org] -- probably a few thousand bigger than 2016 HO3 -- why isn't he talking about them??
Even one of the most prominent foes of the redefinition was instrumental in formulating the one of the metrics for orbital clearing [wikipedia.org] that shows a huge gap between the major planets and things like Pluto and Ceres. Instead of demoting Pluto though, his argument just wants to call the 8 major planets "überplanets," which is still creating an equivalent distinction, just prefixing a term on a different group. What difference does it make whether we have hundreds of "planets" and 8 "überplanets" vs. hundreds of "dwarf planets" and 8 "planets"? Given the much, much longer history of using the word "planet" alone for the major planets, it probably makes a little more sense to go with the "dwarf planet" idea... otherwise it's kind of like Starbucks calling a small drink a "tall."
Lastly, is it even worth pointing out that Pluto is STILL a "planet" (a term that still basically follows his definition of "round and not on fire"), just a "dwarf" one?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @03:22AM (1 child)
So what's his solution? He says his post is "satire" in the sense that he doesn't REALLY believe Earth is not a planet, but he doesn't propose an alternate definition that doesn't lead us to revise the definition of the "planets" in the Solar System every other week.
Um, yeah, he does. "Round and not on fire." As far as I can tell, you think he'll want it revised every week because you've assumed he wants to somehow exclude everything except the "Classic Nine", but he never says that.
If Pluto is so worthy of the designation, what about the other Kuiper belt objects?
Are they round and not on fire? Planets! (So not tiny irregular-shaped ones, nor any cold-fusioning ones that may exist.)
Or is he going to draw an arbitrary distance line from the sun?
Why? Surely things don't stop being rounded by their own gravity, or spontaneously combust, because of some arbitrary distance line?
Or some other arbitrary distinction?
Again, why? This guy gets enough things wrong*, there's no need to criticize him for wanting arbitrary distinctions when you're the only one proposing them.
(IMO, the fact that many satellites become planets under such a definition is far more likely to bother people and result in arbitrary distinctions than "b-b-but... hundreds of planets!". Personally, I don't mind that either -- I'm quite capable of handling the idea that something can be a planet and a moon at the same time.)
Even one of the most prominent foes of the redefinition was instrumental in formulating the one of the metrics for orbital clearing that shows a huge gap between the major planets and things like Pluto and Ceres. Instead of demoting Pluto though, his argument just wants to call the 8 major planets "überplanets," which is still creating an equivalent distinction, just prefixing a term on a different group. What difference does it make whether we have hundreds of "planets" and 8 "überplanets" vs. hundreds of "dwarf planets" and 8 "planets"?
Well, the difference is that Stern's scheme has 3 labels; both "überplanets" and "unterplanets" are subsets of "planets". These labels make grammatical sense.
Lastly, is it even worth pointing out that Pluto is STILL a "planet" (a term that still basically follows his definition of "round and not on fire"), just a "dwarf" one?
Well, that's exactly the problem; under the IAU's definitions, a dwarf planet is not a planet at all. In an attempt to split the middle, they picked the worst nomenclature possible.
You can either have the set "planet" with two subsets "dwarf planet" and "??? planet" (where ??? can be any adjective, such as "classical" or "über-"), or you can have two sets "planet" and "???" (where ??? is anything not of the form "$ADJECTIVE planet"; "planetoid was suggested (but has unfortunate history as a synonym for "asteroid"), and I think "planetino" was tossed around?); I don't have strong feelings either way. But having mutually-exclusive sets labeled "planet" and "dwarf planet" is just a horrible thing to do.
*My favorite was "since a planet is a planet regardless of what system it’s in (unless the IAU would like to vote against that?)"; of course the very IAU resolution that demoted Pluto specifically defined a planet to be "in orbit around the Sun". Or right in TFS, we have "(I think we'll eventually discover that very few of the 'planets' have cleared their orbits)"; as you say, the numerous Earth-crossing asteroids, but also the trojans and plutinos, have already proved that few if any planets have "cleared their orbits" -- for a sufficiently ridiculous definition of that phrase. It's a pretty valid criticism of the IAU definition that it doesn't specify a definition for "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit", but substituting ridiculous definitions and saying "See, it makes no sense!" is silly, and imagining that 2016 HO3 is somehow the first body you can combine with your ridiculous definition to "discredit" the IAU is both silly and astronomically illiterate. Frankly, I'm not too happy to be defending this clown...
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 04 2017, @07:21AM
He might still want to add something else. Or he'll have to label a soccer ball a planet because it is round and not on fire (of course as soon as someone sets it on fire, the soccer ball loses its planetary status. I'm not sure whether it then is a sta, though ;-))
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @07:07PM (1 child)
I'm starting to believe that astronomers are the social "science" of space exploration.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 03 2017, @07:25PM
Nah. This is just what they do in their free time.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @07:11PM (7 children)
I've seen pictures of Pluto; it's a planet.
There. Settled.
(Score: 3, Funny) by isostatic on Monday April 03 2017, @07:14PM (5 children)
No, it's a dog.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @08:08PM (2 children)
No, he's a god. God of the underworld!
Dwarf planets and Disney characters are posers.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 03 2017, @08:33PM
A dog and a god are almost the same. The difference is just from which side you are looking. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday April 03 2017, @10:50PM
God, Dog, potato potato
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 03 2017, @08:09PM
Pluto is (disambiguation) [wikipedia.org]:
(mythology) another name for Hades
a fictional cat in "The Black Cat" (1843)
(Marvel Comics), an interpretation of the Greco-Roman god used in Marvel Comics
HMS Pluto, a number of ships of the Royal Navy
Pluto (New Zealand band)
Pluto, West Virginia, United States
. . . and many others I did not reproduce above . . .
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 1) by anotherblackhat on Monday April 03 2017, @11:27PM
No, she's a Sailor.
You know ... like in the song [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by mhajicek on Monday April 03 2017, @11:00PM
Does it have a shoulder thing that goes up?
The spacelike surfaces of time foliations can have a cusp at the surface of discontinuity. - P. Hajicek
(Score: 2) by Ken_g6 on Monday April 03 2017, @07:12PM (6 children)
I'd like a stricter definition of planet that says something about having an atmosphere. (Oh, and containing the barycenter of its local orbital group of objects; something orbiting that barycenter but not containing it is a moon, or if nothing contains the barycenter you might have a "double planet".) That way Pluto is not a planet. And neither is Mercury.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Monday April 03 2017, @07:42PM
An atmosphere is a rather arbitrary requirement, even worse than clearing it's orbit. Especially since practically every significant body in the solar system, even the Moon, has at least a trace atmosphere. What possible not-completely-arbitrary conditions could you use as the threshold? I mean if you use Jupiter as the reference point, then Earth doesn't really have an atmosphere to speak of...
Plus the fact that the existence of a substantial atmosphere is largely based on the interplay of several factors, especially planetary chemistry and magnetism.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by DannyB on Monday April 03 2017, @08:13PM (1 child)
Use some reasonable definition to be applied to new discoveries, with astronomical objects known as planets prior to September 8, 1966 being whitelisted as planets, as part of the definition.
Is that a hack to fix the definition?
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @10:00PM
*googles the date*
*surrenders nerd card* [smithsonianmag.com]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by vux984 on Monday April 03 2017, @08:28PM
"I'd like a stricter definition of planet that says something about having an atmosphere"
That's kind of arbitrary given the conditions for having an atmosphere depend on gravity, temperature, magnetic field, how active the solar wind is, etc. Move earth to Mercuries position and cool off the rotating iron core and now earth isn't a planet because the stronger solar wind coupled with no magnetic field just results in the atmosphere getting stripped off??
"or if nothing contains the barycenter you might have a "double planet".)"
If the earth was simply a bit more dense, then the barycenter might move beyond the planet. Or alternatively if the moon were more dense, that could pull it out of the earth.
The classification of things such as planets / dwarf planets is like the classification between hills and mountains; or a cape vs a bay or a stream vs a river. Strict definitions really don't make sense; and often run against colloquial / historical terms. The Caspian "Sea" is a really a "lake"... etc; feel free to tilt at that windmill...
Spending time arguing about it is silly; the various classifications are generally useful but being too pedantic especially when considering renaming/re-classifying features that were classified before the classification system was formalized (or revised) is just counter productive.
(Score: 2) by driven on Monday April 03 2017, @09:39PM (1 child)
If Earth is not a planet, then the word "planet" is not a very useful one. Why don't they invent some new word to call whatever the hell they are creating a special definition for. Earth is the gold standard in planets and always should be.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:50AM
Inhabitants of a gas or ice giant might disagree with that.
Even among our major planets, we have different subcategories: "gas giants" (Jupiter, Saturn), "ice giants" (Neptune, Uranus), and "rocky planets" (the 4 inner planets).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Monday April 03 2017, @07:24PM (46 children)
I'll accept Pluto as a "planet" when we require that schoolkids memorize the names of all 110+ plus "planets" in this system.
Otherwise, you need some kind of cut-off to distinguish the important planets from the less-important ones.
As for Pluto, you shouldn't call it a planet without also mentioning Charon. The two are a binary pair: the barycenter of the Pluto-Charon system is *outside* of Pluto.
The only reason people want to keep calling Pluto a planet is because of nostalgia. Otherwise, they would be affording the same status to Ceres, Eris, Makemake, Huamea, Sedna, Quaoar, 2013 FY37, 2007 OR10, etc. No one wants to remember all those names, esp. when most of them don't even have proper names, but alphanumeric designations like those latter two. And how the hell are you supposed to pronounce "Quaoar" anyway? And if you just arbitrarily cut it off at Pluto's mass, then you have to include Eric because it's bigger than Pluto.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 03 2017, @07:36PM (4 children)
It's Haumea [wikipedia.org], you insensitive planet killer!
("Kwawar")
Now you're pulling my leg!
The barycenter thing is a good reason to call Pluto-Charon a binary planet. And any definition of a planet should exclude moons (WTF were they thinking [soylentnews.org]). I don't necessarily agree that kids should have to memorize all the names of the planets. We can have more planets than kids can remember, after all, there are trillions of planets and dwarf planets left to discover in the Milky Way alone.
One thing I've seen is that if you plot the mass vs. distance to the Sun on a graph, you can craft a definition that allows Mercury and Planet Nine but not Eris and friends. And the KBOs/TNOs are remarkably icy and tiny compared to the inner planets... so far. There's still a possibility of larger Mars-sized objects accompanying Planet Nine or being found further out (hundreds of AU). Planet Nine is still hypothetical unless we observe it, but I think it will be proven or disproven by 2020.
I'm going to look into how brightness falls off as AU increases (I forgot the equations). Because I think we're going to find a lot more dwarf planets as we start getting past the eccentric ones that just happen to be close to their perihelions. Thousands, even.
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(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @08:27PM (3 children)
Pluto is geologically active with a dynamic surface; not just your regular icy piece of rock.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Monday April 03 2017, @08:39PM (1 child)
Geological activity? Does that mean Io [wikipedia.org] should be called a planet?
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(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Monday April 03 2017, @09:30PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:54AM
Pluto is geologically active with a dynamic surface; not just your regular icy piece of rock.
Not necessarily true, the way you've written this. Yes, it's geologically active according to our most recent data, however you're claiming with your second clause that other such worlds are not. You have no way of knowing that. We only just learned about Pluto's surface thanks to New Horizons. We haven't flown any probes by any of the other outer icy-rocky planets like Eris, Sedna, Haumea, etc., so for all we know, they're ALL geologically active. Pluto might not be special at all in that regard. There's no similar planets here in the inner system to compare to.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @07:53PM
Seriously? You're trotting out a "Think of the children" argument??
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Monday April 03 2017, @08:01PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday April 03 2017, @08:15PM
School children, please name the nine planets and their capitols.
When trying to solve a problem don't ask who suffers from the problem, ask who profits from the problem.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Monday April 03 2017, @08:39PM (15 children)
I'll accept Pluto as a "planet" when we require that schoolkids memorize the names of all 110+ plus "planets" in this system.
The only reason people want to keep calling Pluto a planet is because of nostalgia.
Er, nope, no cognitive dissonance there at all... Sigh.
This what happens when you take an arbitrary label and try and defend it as if it is some sort of scientific hypothesis.
Look guys, here's the full and complete definition of "Planet":
A planet is one of
...or any fictitious world that is described as a "planet" in the source work. Meanwhile, although its a bit anthropocentric, we'll stick with "exoplanet" for anything orbiting another star until the inhabitants come and accuse us of xenophobia.
Because any single term that covers everything from a small ball of rock to a gas giant a few monoliths short of becoming a star (and started out as meaning anything that moved relative to the "fixed" stars) is as much use as a chocolate fucking teapot for any serious scientific classification work, so we might as well pick the arbitrary definition that requires the least reprinting of astronomy books. That's no more an "appeal to tradition" than any of the arguments for demoting Pluto.
If your Plutophobia is such that you really can't abide it, then my alternative definition of "Planets" is Any planet included as a movement in the original orchestral suite by Gustav Holst - which is about as scientifically valid as anything being proposed by the IAU. (Tough luck Earth, in that case...)
(Score: 3, Touché) by Grishnakh on Monday April 03 2017, @08:43PM (14 children)
So you think a scientific organization should just abandon science altogether and adopt terminology based on tradition? That's the dumbest thing I've read all day.
(Score: 2) by tibman on Monday April 03 2017, @09:10PM (9 children)
Define "Month" for me in scientific terms. Maybe scientists should have a new calendar based on full moons or how long the speed of light takes to reach the earth multiplied by some magic number constant. : D
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Monday April 03 2017, @09:20PM
A new calendar based on full moons? How about one of the several old calendars still in use today that are based on moon phase? I mean, the concept of a month was started by Babylonians back in the day, who got the idea from observing the lunar cycle, which sounds pretty scientific to me. Just because various Roman emperors mucked up the calendar in an exercise in self-aggrandizement doesn't mean that the concept is silly.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @10:31PM (2 children)
Except that scientists don't measure anything in "months", but instead use units of time that do have precise scientific definitions, like seconds, days, or years. Maybe they measure their paychecks in months, but that's not really science anymore.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:38AM (1 child)
Does anyone still get paychecks in months? I thought everyone would have switched to bi-weekly pay periods by now. Months are a terrible measure for anything. Honestly, they need to switch to a 13-month year, with each month having 28 days (4 weeks). It would be far easier to work with. There'd only be one irregularity, which is a single extra day in the year, which we could put at the end of the year and have as a holiday. There'd be two such days every 4 years for Leap Year. Our current calendar system is stupid and nonsensical.
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:27PM
But then every 400 years we would only have 1 extra day instead of 2.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:35AM (4 children)
What the hell does this have to do with anything? Nothing in science uses "months" as a unit, because it isn't a consistent unit. Scientists use "seconds", which is an arbitrary unit, but it's well-defined and consistent and works nicely with the SI system of units for unit conversions (e.g. 1 Joule/second = 1 Watt).
There is some usage of "years", but that's scientific: it's the amount of time it takes the planet to complete one orbit around the Sun. And even that's not all that exact (it takes 1.00001742096 years to complete one orbit), so it's only really useful for comparisons to a human-comprehensible timescale (e.g. light-years: "it takes radio waves 4.x years to travel to Alpha Centauri").
Seriously, WTF is your point here?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Tuesday April 04 2017, @08:46PM (3 children)
Didn't expect people to get so riled up. So science doesn't define a month because scientists don't use months? When they describe the time required to travel between Earth and Mars they speak in seconds? Okay, let's ignore that for now. But you're really close when you say there is fuzziness (and usefulness) when using "human scales". Such as months. But let's talk scale. Jupiter and Mercury are planets. Pluto is a dwarf planet. That is arbitrary. Compared to Jupiter the Earth is sub-dwarf. Jupiter has a storm that is literally bigger than the entire earth. Calling Pluto a dwarf planet is so stupid.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @09:30PM (2 children)
If calling Pluto a dwarf planet is "stupid", then is it also stupid to not call Vesta a planet? Why or why not? Why is Pluto special enough to be a planet, but not Vesta? And why not various small asteroids in solar orbit? What about Halley's Comet, is that a planet too? And what about Ceres? So in your little world, exactly how many "planets" are there anyway?
(Score: 2) by tibman on Wednesday April 05 2017, @01:10PM (1 child)
Dwarf planet. When Earth is 1000x smaller than Jupiter and still classified as just planet. Pluto shouldn't be called dwarf because that is a reference to size. It's a planet.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday April 05 2017, @02:21PM
Ok then, so what do you propose as the cut-off? What makes a body orbiting the Sun not a planet any more? Is Vesta a planet? How about some 10-meter asteroid?
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Tuesday April 04 2017, @09:53AM (3 children)
So you think a scientific organization should just abandon science altogether and adopt terminology based on tradition? That's the dumbest thing I've read all day.
You say "I'll accept Pluto as a "planet" when we require that schoolkids memorize the names of all 110+ plus "planets" in this system" then turn around and criticise others of appealing to tradition? Hypocritical much?
The reality is that the Plutophobes have already abandoned science in favour of their preferred list of traditional planets, but instead of dropping "planet" as a scientific term, they have invented a set of pseudo-scientific rules contrived to give the answer they want. Its pretty clear from the arguments here that the "correct" interpretation of "clearing its orbit" is whichever one successfully selects the "Holstian" planets. Whether eliminating Pluto is part of the objective, or if it is just acceptable collateral damage for the sake of avoiding the reality of the solar system, I don't know. Frankly, its this intellectual dishonesty that's more of an issue than whether or not Pluto gets called a planet.
I'm just being honest about it. When all humanity could see of the Solar System was the sun, moon and the 5 brightest planets (comets appeared and disappeared randomly so were obviously different) then "Planet"="Object that appears to move relative to the 'fixed' stars" was a good, solid, scientific definition. Since then, and particularly in the last 50 years or so as telescopes have got really good and robot probes have toured the system, that definition has become obsolete. Either admit that "planet" now means "those bodies in the solar system traditionally known as planets" or let go of your tradition and accept that we now know that there are 110+ planets in the solar system.
If someone tries to argue that the solar system orbits the Earth, there's a wealth of scientific evidence that absolutely refutes that theory. There is, however, no scientific fact to determine whether or not a particular lump of rock should be called a "planet" - just whatever arbitrary rule we make up. The IAU has chosen to gratuitously re-write the dictionary for no scientifically good reason apart from nostalgia for only having a few planets. This is not a scientific argument.
And if its more important to you that kids should rote-learn the names of your personal favourite planets rather than learn the important distinction between a scientific fact and an arbitrary definition, then for fuck's sake don't involve yourself in science education.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:57PM (2 children)
they have invented a set of pseudo-scientific rules contrived to give the answer they want.
There are several metrics [wikipedia.org] for defining "clearing the neighborhood" using various factors. There's a pretty significant gap between the major planets and Pluto (as well as Ceres, Eris, etc.) for all of them. You can argue that they're ALL arbitrary metrics, I suppose, but at least they have a consistent definition rather than just an appeal to "tradition."
Either admit that "planet" now means "those bodies in the solar system traditionally known as planets" or let go of your tradition and accept that we now know that there are 110+ planets in the solar system.
Here's the problem -- what do you mean by "traditionally known as planets"?? Ceres [wikipedia.org] was considered a planet for over 50 years after its discovery in 1801. Why isn't it a "traditional planet"? Well, by the mid-1800s, other objects were found with similar orbits, so it was realized that Ceres was not like the other major planets, but rather part of a group of objects which were then named "asteroids."
Pluto was considered a "planet" for roughly 75 years (not that much longer than Ceres), though its planetary status came to be questioned in the early 1990s after the discovery of other Kuiper Belt objects.
You can argue about whether the new definition of planet is "fair" or "rigorous" or "arbitrary" or whatever, but the fact is that we've been through this before in astronomy, with a "planet" traditionally known as such (Ceres was assigned its own planetary symbol, etc.) for a good portion of a century, until it was realized it was just a small object that was part of a larger collection and therefore didn't belong on the same level as the other major planets. The EXACT same thing happened with Pluto.
So why do you argue so vociferously in favor of the "traditional planet" Pluto? What about Ceres? Or, shouldn't scientists be able to develop better theories and classifications as they gather more data, like they did with Ceres?
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 04 2017, @03:04PM
Oh, and you might be interested in this table [wikipedia.org], which gives a more exhaustive list of objects that "traditionally" had been referred to as "planets" at some point in the history of science, until they were reclassified within better categories.
(Score: 2) by theluggage on Wednesday April 05 2017, @02:27PM
Ceres [wikipedia.org] was considered a planet for over 50 years after its discovery in 1801.
So call Ceres a planet, then. Ceres won't mind.
Ceres was assigned its own planetary symbol, etc.
Sounds like 'demoting' it was just as silly as demoting Pluto, then.
Point is, if anybody is doing any useful research on the solar system, they're gonna grab a comprehensive database of all the known objects in the solar system and filter for the shape, size, mass, composition, albedo, orbital parameters and number of co-orbiting teapots according to their requirements. They're not going to say "show me the things called 'planet'". "Planet" stopped being a useful scientific category once there were more known objects in the solar system than you could count on your fingers.
In 1801, nobody could be sure that asteroids and planets weren't fundamentally different types of object to planets. Now we've sent probes to asteroids, comets and planets and know something of the huge diversity even within those categories and the similarities between them, and have actual data on which to base useful categorisations.
Then there's the nonsense of "dwarf planet" vs "planet" when the key differentiating factor is orbital properties rather than size...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 03 2017, @09:00PM (15 children)
I'll accept Pluto as a "planet" when we require that schoolkids memorize the names of all 110+ plus "planets" in this system.
How ugly - holding schoolkids hostage to your opinions on science! The obvious rebuttal here is that this definition of planet only works for the Solar System (well, once we've decided what the definition is) and it's completely irrelevant scientifically whether there are 8 planets and 100+ "dwarf planets" or 100+ planets with a few really big ones.
And in exchange for hypothetically protecting our children from having to memorize 100+ really weird names, we get a definition that is extremely hard to use for the other ~50 billion star systems out there in the Milky Way.
(Score: 3, Touché) by jdavidb on Monday April 03 2017, @09:34PM (1 child)
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 2, Funny) by corando on Tuesday April 04 2017, @06:44PM
Oh, that reminds me. I've been meaning to talk to you about something.... Remember that summer we sat alone under the stars, but not in contemplation of Pluto's planetary status? ... Well...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:46AM (12 children)
It's not irrelevant scientifically. Categorization is an important part of science; just ask any botanist or biologist whether they think it's "irrelevant" whether some species has one name versus another name, and which genus, family, etc. it's in. To them, it absolutely is.
Definitions change; that's what's happened here, and it's possible these definitions will change again as we learn more about other star systems. There's no such thing as devising a classification system that never changes in the face of new information.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:19AM (9 children)
It's not irrelevant scientifically. Categorization is an important part of science; just ask any botanist or biologist whether they think it's "irrelevant" whether some species has one name versus another name, and which genus, family, etc. it's in.
I quite disagree. Labels don't change the actual science. For example, the Aptostichus barackobamai [soylentnews.org] isn't going to behave differently, if it were the Aptostichus donaldtrumpus. Similarly, Saturn doesn't change whether or not there are a hundred planets or dwarf planets in our categorization system. What is different is that the current definition can't be extended to the rest of the galaxy while any definition based on roundness or mass is easy to extend.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:45AM (8 children)
Terrible analogy. You focused on the species name (with a broken link, I'll add), not the genus name (aptostichus). If you changed the name to "homo barackobamai" (the same genus as humans), or worse, to "Apomastus barackobamai" (a different genus under the same family of spiders in Euctenizidae), it would cause a lot of confusion. The kingdom-phylum-class-order-family-genus-species classification system exists for a good reason in biology.
For now, the rest of the galaxy is basically irrelevant. We've detected over 1000 exoplanets now, but we still don't know much about them other than they're all pretty big (bigger than Earth) because that's all we can see from this distance. We can't even see if they're round; we can only assume they must be because our observations show that any mass that large achieves hydrostatic equilibrium, but we only know that from observing a small handful of samples in this one system. There's no way for us to see that in another star system without going there. We sure as hell aren't going to be able to see (any time soon) if those exoplanets have "cleared their orbits", since there's no way for us to resolve small asteroid-size objects from dozens of light-years away.
When we actually get data back from deep-space probes showing actual photos of some of these exoplanets and their systems, then we can talk about how good these definitions are. For now, they only really need to fit our own system, though they do seem to work OK for exoplanets too since they're all so big. We're probably not going to have to worry for a long time whether some exoplanet is a "exo-dwarf-planet" because we can't see anything that small.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:51AM (2 children)
If you changed the name to "homo barackobamai" (the same genus as humans), or worse, to "Apomastus barackobamai" (a different genus under the same family of spiders in Euctenizidae), it would cause a lot of confusion.
I didn't. Any labeling system which has the same hierarchical structure and category boundaries will have the same information content no matter what the labels are.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:14AM (1 child)
Then your analogy makes zero sense. No one is proposing renaming "Pluto". They changed the classification. That's akin to changing the genus on that spider, not the species. The species name can be anything, it doesn't matter. That's why they got away with choosing such a crappy name for it. The genus (and family, order, etc.) names are very important, because they establish that species' relation to other species. This is just like how we call different bodies "planets", "comets", "asteroids", "stars", etc., to categorize them and distinguish them from one another.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:58AM
Then your analogy makes zero sense. No one is proposing renaming "Pluto". They changed the classification.
How so? The classification wasn't actually changed. Pluto is still Pluto no matter what it is named or how they choose to group it. And the groupings don't add anything scientifically - no matter what biologists say about planets. And this particular classification is already obsolete since it can't be applied outside of the Solar System (by definition), and even if one were to try for star systems where it would make sense to try, there is an artificial and onerous observation threshold that needs to be overcome merely to show any sort of clearing of the neighborhood. I think the informal classification "suspected planet" would become far more common than the designation "planet" for exoplanets, if this definition on hard to observe dynamics becomes official galaxy-wide. No one would care enough to actually make the classification work for most objects.
Then there's the implied meaning of "dwarf planet". There are certain adjectives that inherently mean that the object is not actually of the category of the bare noun, such as "fake diamonds" not actually being diamonds. But "dwarf" is not one of those words. If I were to say "dwarf mammoth" you wouldn't think that the object is not actually a mammoth. But "dwarf planets" are supposedly not actually "planets". This abuses the language.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @03:07AM (2 children)
We're probably not going to have to worry for a long time whether some exoplanet is a "exo-dwarf-planet" because we can't see anything that small.
It's already a problem because exo-dwarf-planets need not be small. If a several Jupiters mass exoplanet is hanging out in the L4/L5 points of a binary star system, it's not a planet by our definition (ignoring of course that the definition is specifically for the Solar System).
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:11AM (1 child)
Um, if I understand astrophysics right (and there's a good chance I'm mistaken), a body the mass of several Jupiters is more likely to be called a "brown dwarf star", not a planet.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @05:01AM
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 04 2017, @07:42AM (1 child)
But that's exactly what the IAU was doing. According to the rules of language, a dwarf planet should be a planet. According to the IAU rules, it isn't.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday April 04 2017, @03:29PM
Well, I suppose that's the case, but only because the IAU doesn't append some sort of additional qualifier onto the major planets. But both planets and dwarf planets share two criteria, while (major) "planets" have a third. Implicitly, the two shared characteristics could easily be viewed as a more general interpretation of the word "planet," which is how I choose to view it from a linguistic sense.
It's kind of like comparing a mini-fridge to a refrigerator. If you just say the word "refrigerator" out of context, people will probably assume you mean a full-size home refrigerator (and not a mini-fridge or a walk-in restaurant fridge or whatever). We don't generally feel the need to preface "refrigerator" with qualifying terms like "full-size home refrigerator" or whatever in most contexts. And most normal people asked to define and give an example of the word "refrigerator" in English would probably think of the most common kind.
But there is ALSO a broader definition of refrigerator that has to do with shared characteristics, which would cover everything from mini-fridges to walk-in fridges. So, a mini-fridge can both be a "refrigerator" according to some shared criteria AND also not an exemplar of "refrigerator" as that term is generally pictured when referenced without qualification. If you want your audience to understand a term out of context, you'd likely say "mini-fridge" or "compact fridge" or whatever, because they don't satisfy the normal association of "refrigerator" out of context.
I know this may not be the way the IAU frames its rules exactly, but we could do the same analysis for any number of English terms. E.g., "house" vs. "dollhouse" or "doghouse" or whatever. There's some shared set of criteria that make all of them "houses" in some abstract sense, but without context nobody would think of a dollhouse or doghouse as included in the common definition of "house," and yet they still ARE "houses" (just for dolls or dogs). Without context, we assume "people house"; without context, the IAU assumes "planet" = "body that cleared its neighborhood."
That's how imprecise English normally works, with a lot of assumptions. But the IAU has to be give a more precise language definition for scientific terms... which basically doesn't seem to open the door for the free usage and connotations that happen with most English words in such circumstances. But I don't see any reason whatsoever that we shouldn't look at commonalities in definitions and conclude that a statement like "Pluto is still a planet, just a dwarf planet" is a valid utterance.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday April 04 2017, @07:38AM
But they couöld instead have declared that there are two classes of planets, main planets and dwarf planets. Then Pluto would have been remained a planet, avoiding the confusing definition that something which is classified as "something planet" isn't classified as planet, and Mercury to Neptune would now be main planets. Main planets and dwarf planets would be subclasses of planets, as the names suggest, and you'd not only end up having the same distinction asnow, you'd even have a name for the class of objects that is the union of main planets and dwarf planets, namely planets.
The way they did it, we have now dwarf planets that are not planets, disregarding all rules of language, and we have no word for the class of objects that are either planets or dwarf planets.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday April 04 2017, @12:02PM
And they'll tell you your nuts aren't nuts, your berries aren't berries, and that your fruit aren't fruit. Oh, and some of your flowers aren't flowers either. If any science had nomenclature by humpty dumpty, botany's it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday April 03 2017, @09:05PM (4 children)
I think that is the majority of the butthurt that some people have. It was what they *learned*, and now they've *learned* they were wrong. Plus, I actually believe that a good amount of people associated it with the Disney character Pluto while learning about the planets in school. Do any young people get upset about Pluto not being a planet?
There was a moment in which I felt bad for Pluto being demoted, but then I remembered that I was not an astronomer or astrophysicist and I was not involved in the science and the determination of the nomenclature and jargon that would be used. I was just taught a small part of it in school to be well rounded.
If there is anything I have some emotional involvement with...... the '#'
That's a fucking pound sign or number sign (depending on order), not Twitter's revisionist bullshit of calling it the hashtag symbol. It's the fucking pound sign!! :)
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @09:30PM (2 children)
The pound sign looks like an L with a loop at the corner and a bar across the middle. It's for money in the UK.
The '#' symbol is called the octothorpe. (because of the 8 points)
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:01AM (1 child)
Pound weight, not pound money.
And isn't a thorpe an old word for a village-like thing that's too small to have a church?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:23AM
Nope :)
It's for Jim Thorpe, the Olympic Athlete from Sweden. In this case, truth [mit.edu] is stranger than fiction.
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:42AM
According to Brits, that symbol is called the "hash", and has been for far, far longer than Twitter's been around. There's nothing "revisionist" about it, it's a national difference, just like that panel over your car's engine is called a "bonnet" over there, and the rear end of a sedan is called a "boot", and they don't even call them "sedans", but rather "saloons" (which we Americans think are alcohol-serving establishments in the Old West).
But yeah, we're not astronomers or astrophysicists, so it's really not up to us what nomenclature and terminology those professions use. But Americans these days absolutely hate education and expertise (they consider it "elitism") so they think they know better than the actual experts in everything. Pluto isn't going anywhere, nor is it changing its name, regardless of how we choose to categorize it.
(Score: 1) by toddestan on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:49AM
You can apply the exact same argument to "moons". I mean, it's seriously ridiculous that we make schoolkids memorize the 60+ moons of Jupiter. Many of which are just some number and aren't even a proper name anyway. We seriously need to redefine "moon" with some arbitrary definition so they only have to memorize a handful of moons! Oh wait, nobody expects anyone to know any more than the four Galilean moons of Jupiter...
The argument that we need to define planet in such a way that there's only a small number of them is silly. So what if there ends up being a few hundred of them? Schoolkids would only be expected to memorize the "major planets" or whatever you want to call them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @07:27PM
Really fucking stupid. IAU is trying hard to make itself irrelevant. Maybe they're so bored now that they're tackling minutiae. I'm going back to calling Pluto a planet and when some smartass points out that its no longer considered a planet I will ask them about Earth and then reference this stupid announcement.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday April 03 2017, @07:31PM (13 children)
If thiat is the case, then Jupiter isn't a planet either. There are trojan asteroids sharing its orbit.
As for the outrage, given the options between dropping Pluto or finding ourselves in a sea of hundreds of planets... well, sorry little fella. Doesn't mean I don't think you're awesome. It wasn't done out of any spite for Pluto, but out of concern for all the other objects like Pluto that are out there. It took kind of a kludge to keep the out of the planet club, and it could probably be looked at again to clarify the definition.
How could the distinguished scientists be so wrong?
They're not. You're just deliberately be an arse about it to whip up a stink, aka (one form of) journalism.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday April 03 2017, @07:49PM (3 children)
>between dropping Pluto or finding ourselves in a sea of hundreds of planets
I fail to find an issue with the idea that there are hundreds of "planets".
8 of them are special because of their locations. That doesn't mean nothing else can be a planet, or that you have to remember all of the names beyond the special 8...
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:58AM (2 children)
No, 8 of them are special because of their size. They're not the only planetoids in the inner system; Ceres is between Mars and Jupiter (as is Vesta, but it's not even round). Ceres is considered a dwarf planet too, but for some odd reason the Pluto-defenders don't want to include Ceres in the planet-club. The main 8 are special because they're all *much* bigger than the others.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:30AM (1 child)
Well, really they're special because of the combination of size (mass, really) and location. Mercury is a big neighborhood-clearing bad-ass in its 88-day orbit, but if you put it out in the Kuiper Belt, it would be just another KBO, worth exclaiming "Pretty big for a dwarf planet!", but definitely not a proper IAU-approved planet.
Also, be careful with "size" -- Titan and Ganymede are both larger in diameter than Mercury, but about half the mass; important to note which one we mean, so I'll go with mass. As soon as you include satellites in a list of solar system bodies, the supposed big gap (factor of 25) between Mercury and Eris/Pluto/etc. is shredded by the six big satellites (the Galileans, Titan, and Luna), and the biggest gaps left are between Neptune and Earth (factor of 14.5, everyone agrees this is a big deal), between Venus and Mars (factor of 7.5 -- but we treat terrestrial planets as basically similar?) and between Saturn and Uranus (factor of 5.5); from there down, I don't see any gaps bigger than a factor of 2-3 (but I gave up somewhere around Ceres, Orcus, and Tethys, or about 0.0001 M⊕).
Remember, definitions promoted by many people do include the larger satellites as planets. Not the "You'll have exactly nine planets, and you'll like them!" nostalgiacs, obviously, but people like Alan Stern think planethood should be determined by intrinsic properties, and follow that principle to its logical conclusion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:35AM
Whoops, make that the big seven moons; how could I forget Triton?!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by vux984 on Monday April 03 2017, @08:36PM (8 children)
"As for the outrage, given the options between dropping Pluto or finding ourselves in a sea of hundreds of planets..."
There are more than 2 options; this is a false dilemma.
We can keep Pluto as a planet due to it's historical significance, and not extend that classification to everything else... the rest are just KBO's. Nothing else like Pluto need ever be classified a planet ever again.
The Caspain Sea is a lake, there are mountains that are just hills, there are rivers that are just streams... the Niagra Peninsula isn't really a peninsula, it's an ithmus... etc.
We can call pluto a planet without breaking Astronomy.
(Score: 2) by Murdoc on Monday April 03 2017, @10:44PM (3 children)
This makes the most sense to me. It works in the animal kingdom too; killer whales aren't whales either, etc. If needed we could go so far as to call it an "honorary" planet, like how people get "honorary" doctorates, because of Pluto's historical and cultural significance. You're right, it wouldn't break astronomy.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday April 03 2017, @11:01PM
"Killer whale" is the common, historical name for the species. They are not scientifically classified as whales. Even in layman's terms they are not usually referred to as whales.
It's not like Pluto is called "Planet Pluto."
If needed we could go so far as to call it an "honorary" planet, like how people get "honorary" doctorates, because of Pluto's historical and cultural significance. You're right, it wouldn't break astronomy.
Historical and cultural significance have little, perhaps nothing, to do with the science of astronomy. Pluto belongs far more obviously in the same scientific category as Sedna, Eris, and Ceres than it does with Neptune, Mercury, and Mars.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:59AM (1 child)
"Killer whales" aren't even called that any more except by fools. Their more proper name is "orca". Scientists have Latin names for these animals anyway.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:47PM
Do the needful, Grishna, and correct hundreds of years of English usage!
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Monday April 03 2017, @10:54PM (3 children)
That's not a very scientific thing to do. If you're going to have categories at all, they should be defined as scientifically as possible. Some thought should be given to convenience - it's perhaps a little late to start renaming the Old World Monkeys and the New World Monkeys despite the troublesome position of apes between them - but for simply moving Pluto to another category, it's hardly a big problem.
The Caspain Sea is a lake, there are mountains that are just hills, there are rivers that are just streams... the Niagra Peninsula isn't really a peninsula, it's an ithmus... etc.
Those are names, not category memberships. As an analogy, it only works if people referred the Caspian Sea as "a sea," but they don't. They refer to it as a lake, which is what it is; only its name is "The Caspian Sea." There may be features called "(X) Mountain" that are just hills, but there are no actual mountains that are just hills.
(That said, by some criteria, the Caspian Sea is sometimes classified as an actual sea, but not for historical naming reasons)
Pluto's name is not "Planet Pluto," it's just "Pluto."
We can call pluto a planet without breaking Astronomy.
We can also just call it a dwarf planet, which far better suits its actual state, and puts it in a category with objects with which it has far more in common than the planets.
It doesn't make it any less interesting an object.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:01AM (2 children)
"That's not a very scientific thing to do."
The difference between a planet and not a planet isn't really that scientific.
"If you're going to have categories at all, they should be defined as scientifically as possible."
Reality defies such classification. Species can't interbreed fertile offspring... and then ring species (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ring_species) show up to mangle the system.
"We can also just call it a dwarf planet, which far better suits its actual state"
Until we find some planetoid somewhere that sites right on the cusp between planet and dwarf planet... or worse it'll violate all the 'rules' ... a ball of ice the size of jupiter floating around in an eccentric axis off the planetary plane. Its not an ice giant class of planet... because its not a planet due to its orbit and position. Its not really a KBO because its the size of jupiter....etc.
" it only works if people referred the Caspian Sea as "a sea," but they don't"
Of course they do. Perhaps scientists don't, but most people do.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @02:02AM (1 child)
What "most people" do is not of much concern to scientists when they're doing scientific work. But for some stupid reason, these idiotic "most people" seem to think that they can dictate to scientists what kind of terminology they can use.
(Score: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:54AM
What "most people" do is not of much concern to scientists when they're doing scientific work.
Don't over inflate how much science this really is. Planet vs dwarf planet ... especially for things right up against the line is as much science as hill vs mountain... The stuff in the middle of each class is quite distinct... but there is no 'hard line' between the classes and whatever the exact line they pick is going to be arbitrary.
There is no real 'scientific work' that depends on pluto being a planet or not-planet. As far as I can tell the only real difference to the IAU is that the classification determines how it gets named... Pluto is already named so what difference does it really make what its classified?
All the planet 'discriminators' are pretty arbitrary. I mean...Stern-Levinson lamda > 1? Soter's mu > 100 ? Margot's Pi ...? Why those constants? because they are round numbers? This isn't "science". This is as arbitrary as deciding that a hill is 2000 ft, but its a mountain if its 2001 ft tall... or is that 'science' too?