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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: 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 . . .
The lower I set my standards the more accomplishments I have.
(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