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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: 2) by vux984 on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:54AM

    by vux984 (5045) on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:54AM (#488534)

    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?

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