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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: 1) by toddestan on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:49AM

    by toddestan (4982) on Tuesday April 04 2017, @01:49AM (#488483)

    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.

    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.