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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 khallow on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:58AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 04 2017, @04:58AM (#488535) Journal

    Then your analogy makes zero sense. No one is proposing renaming "Pluto". They changed the classification.

    How so? The classification wasn't actually changed. Pluto is still Pluto no matter what it is named or how they choose to group it. And the groupings don't add anything scientifically - no matter what biologists say about planets. And this particular classification is already obsolete since it can't be applied outside of the Solar System (by definition), and even if one were to try for star systems where it would make sense to try, there is an artificial and onerous observation threshold that needs to be overcome merely to show any sort of clearing of the neighborhood. I think the informal classification "suspected planet" would become far more common than the designation "planet" for exoplanets, if this definition on hard to observe dynamics becomes official galaxy-wide. No one would care enough to actually make the classification work for most objects.

    Then there's the implied meaning of "dwarf planet". There are certain adjectives that inherently mean that the object is not actually of the category of the bare noun, such as "fake diamonds" not actually being diamonds. But "dwarf" is not one of those words. If I were to say "dwarf mammoth" you wouldn't think that the object is not actually a mammoth. But "dwarf planets" are supposedly not actually "planets". This abuses the language.