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posted by martyb on Monday April 03 2017, @06:54PM   Printer-friendly
from the we-need-cleanup-in-orbit-3 dept.

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


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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by bob_super on Monday April 03 2017, @07:49PM (3 children)

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday April 03 2017, @07:49PM (#488328)

    >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...

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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:58AM (2 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:58AM (#488491)

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:30AM (#488527)

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:35AM (#488529)

        Whoops, make that the big seven moons; how could I forget Triton?!