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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?
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(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
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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.
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(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?