Pluto Making a Comeback 439
anthemaniac writes "Space.com reports that the American Astronomical Unions Division of Planetary Scientists recognizes the IAU's authority to make a new planet defintion but expects it to be altered. Separately, 300 astronomers have signed a petition saying they won't use the definition. All this stems from the discontent over how only 424 astronomers voted on the proposal that demoted Pluto. Looks like this little dog is on the comeback trail."
waiting (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
I am much happier thinking that astronomers are in a hole somewhere in the middle of the night staring into the sky adding to the human body of knowledge, then sitting in a giant auditorium fighting over meaningless bullshit and operating at the lowest forms of the intellectual discourse (semantics and sophistry... voting on definitions.. oh jesus). I liked it better when a bunch of people sitting in a giant room yelling and screaming about nothing and being otherwise useless was called Congress...
This is an argument over terminology. There is nothing of any value, at all, at stake here. This is so people can refer to planets and have it mean something, as a word. This is basically the equivalent of Webster writing down what a word means. This isn't even actual science.. it's just a bunch of people trying to formalize their industry's terminology to facillitate communication. The scientific value of a probe is going to be exactly the same if Pluto is a dwarf planet, a pluton, a planet, a really large Kuiper Belt Object, or anything else.
Just pick a god damm definition. I'm starting to think astronomers are doing this on purpose to get themselves alot of free press and airtime. Professors everywhere are making 6 minutes TV and radio spots to explain this stupid "controversy". It's semantics. Nothing more, nothing less.
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Pluto is and always should be a planet. If they try to claim it isn't, i think it will start a bigger controvers
Re:waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
Originally the Sun and moon were classified as planets. Should we keep that definition for historic reasons?
What about all the round trans-Neptunian objects? 2003 UB313, Charon, Sedna, Quaoar, or the 1000 others? Should all those be planets as well? And if you're gonna include at least everything in the Kuiper belt, you might as well include all the round asteroids. And all the round Trojan bodies.
Shoot, while you're at it, why don't we just include every single comet in the Oort cloud? Then the solar system would have billions of planets. Take that 55 Cancri!
I don't understand why people have a hard time "letting go" of Pluto as a planet... It's floating in a cloud of objects, just like Ceres. And just like Ceres, once we discovered that it's just one of many (some even larger) in a belt of objects, it got reclassified. What's so freggin' hard to understand?
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that ball of rock will be there wether we care or not
But is it really about science? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't really care whether Pluto is a "planet" or "pluton" or "dwarf planet" (since I've long been out of school) but the question I keep asking myself is "Why is the new definition 'better'?" Is it more accurate? Clearer? My take is that if you say "the planets are these nine (o
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"Why is the new definition 'better'?" Is it more accurate? Clearer?"
Than what? There has not been a definition at all previously. There's been a listing of things that has varried in length from 5 down to 4, then slowly up to nine, and then bopped between 10 and 9 a few times, but it's never been based on any clear criteria. "What are the planets in the solar system?" is the total extent of what most grade-school kids learn about astronomy. It would be nice if it meant something. In particular, it wou
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Actually, there is some scientific precedent for this. For example, a few years back zoologists figured out that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were the same species. Apatosaurus was the older term, so it was decreed the official name. There was a minor outcry, because the Brontosaurus was the favorite dinosaur of so many people. So the deci
Re:waiting (Score:5, Funny)
Kind of like Slashdot, you mean?
Re:waiting (Score:5, Funny)
Re:waiting (Score:5, Funny)
No, it's a plausible deniability thing. If they're good aliens, they come here, we explain that we were very primitive but have since learned to count.
If they're bad aliens, we say "What? We only have eight planets. This isn't the solar system you're looking for. Move along..."
Re:waiting (Score:5, Funny)
we defeat them with reclassification? (Score:5, Funny)
IAU: "i hearby reclassify you from bad alien to good alien"
**poof**
(good) alien: "E.T. Phone home..."
Re:waiting (Score:5, Funny)
You're new here in science, aren't you?
Just pick a god damm definition.
Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing! Big Ass Round Thing!
Come on people, let's show these Bozos the power of the Web. Send letters, emails, customized party poppers, whatever; and let 'em know we want our Big Ass Round Things.
KFG
Consistent terminology is crucial to any field (Score:4, Interesting)
Nostalgia or neat names your kids like are no reason to violate the rules of your field. AIDS was orginally categorized as a form of cancer, but then we found that it's not a cancer, so we stopped calling it a cancer. It's simple, really. Once you disprove something, it makes no sense to go on believing it.
The simple truth is that if you call Pluto a planet, then you also have to call Ceres and potentially hundreds of bodies in the Kuiper belt planets as well. Pluto does not dominate its orbit around the sun, it shares it with Charon, they spin around each other, one is not a moon of the other. None of the other planets in the solar system have such a symbiosis, they all have moons that orbit them. What shall we do when we manage to spot specific planetary bodies in distant solar systems? "let's see... hrm, that's a class-M planet, that's a gas giant, that's a dead rock, all of these have moons and they're spherical and dominate their orbits, but hey, here's a neat looking body there dancing with another body, I guess that's a planet too, let's call it Mickey and forget the thing it's spinning with." Where does it end? We need a concise definition that works every time, no exceptions.
As it is, with that gold disc in the voyager spacecrafts showing the planets of our system, it's doubtful ET will find us now since he'll see our system has only 8 planets but his directions said there would be 9. If he stumbles into the system anyway, and finds that's he's got the right place, he's going to think we're a bunch of retards for saying we have 9 planets
Re:Consistent terminology is crucial to any field (Score:4, Informative)
What makes the Kuiper belt so different that its inhabitants get to be planets, and the asteroids don't?
Re:Consistent terminology is crucial to any field (Score:4, Informative)
Pluto should have never been classified as a planet, and was only done so for political reasons, not scientific. It's not in a standard orbit like a planet, it highly eccentric, crossing Neptune's orbit as well as being tilted significantly in the plane of the solar system as compared to the other planets. It's moon is over half its own diameter.
It's probably a rock/ice blob from the Oort cloud that came too close to one of the gas giants and ended up in a roughly stable orbit. It's more like a failed comet than a planet.
Re:waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone at my house just took a vote - We unanimously voted that BeeBeard should send us all his money. And we don't want to hear about sour grapes, like "too few people voted to have any meaning" or "you didn't consider my input first".
The rest, I agree with. These guys have taken to arguing semantics, not a good sign for their future. However, I don't think most of us need to worry, because no one cares what they decide. Consider the definition of a "constellation" - Most of us consider things like the Big Dipper or Orion as constellations; astronomers call those "Asterisms" and refer to large nondescript (except by coordinates) parallelograms of sky as "true" constellations.
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Re:waiting (Score:4, Funny)
Fuck me? Fuck you, you fatuous rube with your puerile lexicon.
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Re:waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
What more information do we need about Pluto? There's lots to learn, but nothing that bears on the argument at hand.
You seem to think that "planet" is a word astronomer's agree on, and we just don't know enough about Pluto to say whether it is one. It's the other way around.
Despite the headlines, astronomers are not arguing over whether Pluto's a planet. They're arguing over the right way to define "planet". Pluto's relevent only because lots of people are used to thinking of Pluto as a planet, and don't want a definition that leaves Pluto out. But that's hard to do. There are millions of trans-Neptunian objects. If Pluto is a planet, than so are many of them.
I heard an interview with an astronmer who described our solar system as it would be seen by an alien arriving from outside. The first thing the alien would notice is the huge cloud of trans-Neptunian objects. Then much further in he'd see 8 planets. Or maybe he'd view them as 4 rocky worlds and 4 gaseous worlds. But in any case he'd differentiate all 8, which orbit pretty much in a single plane, from the TNOs, which form a sort of donut-shaped cloud. If he noticed Pluto at all, he'd definitely classify it with the TNOs.
Then suppose he met us, and we tried to tell him that Pluto isn't a TNO, it's a planet, just because it was discovered before the TNOs. He'd think we were being pretty arbitrary — and he'd be right.
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Re:waiting (Score:5, Insightful)
So? If there's more trans-Neptunian objects out there big enough to be called planets, our system has more planets. What's the big deal? There's nothing magic about the number 9 (or 8) as the number of planets. When Uranus was discovered, the number of known planets increased; it increased again with Neptune. If we find more planets out there, it will increase yet again. No big deal.
Re:waiting (Score:5, Funny)
Then they'd have to learn things like, "My Very Eager Mother Just Sent Us New Pajamas Which Didn't Fit Properly So We Had To Go Back To Walmart And Exchange Them For Better Ones But We Didn't Have The Receipt So There Was Nothing Else To Do But Cause A Distraction In The Store And Run Out With The Correct Ones And Then We Went To McDonald's And I Had A Big Mac With Small Fries But Then..."
Re:waiting (Score:5, Informative)
Your post intrigued me, and after some quick research with the help of Google, I agree. You can fire up Celestia and actually see some of them, just make asteroid orbits and names visible. Pluto fits right in with them; it seems to be the largest of them.
For you unbelievers, here's a list. These objects are all out of the "normal" plane of orbits, just like Pluto.
Name, Radius
Pluto, 1,151km
Ixion, 600km
Quaoar, 625km
Orcus, 800km
Varuna, 450km
And these are just some "nicely named" ones. See "2003 EL61", "2005 FY9", etc for more examples. And you can add more [celestiamotherlode.net] as well. For those with computers that aren't slow, this page [cornell.edu] contains a Celestia ssc of 1007(!) TNOs. Doughnut shaped indeed.
Also, there is a class (like 20%-30%) of them called Plutinos [cornell.edu] which share Pluto's stable 3:2 orbital resonance with Neptune. How did this come to be? There are theories [hawaii.edu], but nothing definitive yet.
The debate will continue, but if you look at that Celestia ssc of 1007 TNOs, it is pretty clear that Pluto is not a "major planet". If it is, then we've got dozens, possibly hundreds of them.
(Apologies if this has been covered before.)
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p.s. I'd like to remind everyone that Ceres, Pallas, Juno and Vesta all used to be officially recognized planets
The whole argument seems quite ridiculous (Score:3, Interesting)
My only relevant qualification for this argument is to be an enthusiastic amateur astronomer, but if anything it has meant I've been following it quite closely.
To be honest, the whole argument seems quite ridiculous to me. If the def
Re:The whole argument seems quite ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
More discovery.... please (Score:4, Interesting)
When they demoted Pulto (Score:3, Interesting)
What more can you say?
Re:When they demoted Pulto (Score:5, Insightful)
When Aristotle pointed out that the Earth wasn't flat, it pissed off a lot of people. When Darwin published The origin of species, it pissed off a lot of people. When climate scientists pointed out the dangers of anthropogenic climate change, it pissed off a lot of people. When they found that Pluto, like Ceres, was within a belt of similarly sized objects, it pissed off a lot of people.
I suspect the reason these people were pissed off is because they can't fathom that new observations means that what they were taught before was wrong, and that the new information gives a better approximation of reality.
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that's pretty funny propaganda (Score:3, Insightful)
no, of course not, that's not logical. if i believe in idea x (evolution) and i believe in idea y (genocide), the fact that idea y is stupid/ wrong does not automatically mean idea x is stupid/ wrong. nor does it mean that if i believe in idea x, that i must also believe in idea y
get it?
but thank you for the humorous propaganda. it's always nic
Now that we have Pluto out of the way (Score:5, Funny)
Metric! (Score:3, Informative)
That's approximately 117 mm for the real scientists
Do you work for Lockheed Martin? (Score:3, Informative)
7 inch would be about 177.8mm.
Re:Now that we have Pluto out of the way (Score:5, Funny)
The first guy to rally against that would have to be mighty brave...
Fuck the pissy "scientists" (Score:4, Insightful)
If they were real scientists, they'd accept the new designation. That's how science works. You modify your model of the universe as new information becomes available. Clyde Tombaugh found the first of an unknown class of objects because Pluto happened to be the closest and easiest to see. They just called it a planet because they lacked the information we have. But now we know about the Kuiper Belt, and have adjusted the definition of Pluto accordingly. Mode me a troll, but stop with the sentimental bullshit. Rather than :losing" a planet we've gained a whole new neighborhood of the Solar System to explore.
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With only 424 of the IAU's 10,000 members having voted on this "issue", it seems that the real scientists are too busy with real science to care about what arbitrary label we give a faraway chunk of rock and ice.
New story tag needed: -1: Who cares?
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It is NOT how science works! Science is not a democracy. Facts, definitions and terms are not up for a vote. A ridiculously tiny handful of "scientists" forgot that last week.
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They just called it a planet because they lacked the information we have.
Actually they called it a planet because they were looking for one. Unfortunatly for them, it wasn't the giant Planet X they were expecting from their calculations.
Definitions are important (Score:2, Insightful)
i just wrote a story about this at kuro5hin.org (Score:5, Interesting)
the issue centers on one the IAU itself says it hasn't addressed with it's new definition of a planet: extrasolar systems. as new telescopes come on line with more resolving power, our bestiary of planets is going to grow by leaps and bounds. it will render the debate over pluto moot
i think a definition of planet should be:
-round, with a significant atmosphere
-this is distinct from a gas giant, which should be considered closer to stars than to planets (round, mostly gas: really just stars without enough critical mass to ignite fusion)
-and distinct from a moon (no atmosphere, but still round)
-asteroids, comets, etc make up the miscellany
and notice, most importantly, i said nothing about what something orbits. what something orbits is really secondary in consideration to what something is composed of. if we find an earth-like "moon" orbiting a gas giant in another solar system, is what it orbits really the first consideration in picking what to call it? no, composition should come first, orbit second. so you could have a moon of the sun (pluto), or a planet of saturn (titan), or an asteroid of mars (deimos/ phobos, etc.)
so this system demotes not only pluto, but also mercury. while promoting titan. so our solar system is composed of:
-4 planets (venus, earth, mars, titan)
-4 gas giants (jupiter, saturn, neptune, uranus)
-and countless moons (of the sun and the planets)/ asteroids (of the sun and the planets)/ comets/ ring systems/ kuiper belt, oort cloud objects/ etc
really, as we see more and more exotic arrangements in extrasolar systems as new telescopes come on line, this debate about pluto will look more and more pedantic. and the IAU should really begin focusing on a more rigid definition no matter what, something they said they weren't doing at their last congress. we will soon have a vastly larger catalogue of strange orbital objects/ arrangements out there. pluto is small potatoes... literally
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What constitutes a "significant" atmosphere? What does "mostly gas" actually mean? (i.e. what separates "planet" from "gas giant"?) Do you reall
of course these are controversial (Score:2)
and certainly there's something solid at the core of saturn/ jupiter
however, ANY system you can possibly think of will be controversial: there will ALWAYS be objects which will defy ANY system of classification. look at our current nuttiness over pluto for example
so if you are going to dismiss this classification system because the definition of "significant" atmosphere can be controversial, then you might as well as dismiss all classification systems, and just stop t
Oh Pluto (Score:5, Funny)
Better tell solar system (Score:5, Funny)
What can the IDers take from this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, I know that this whole planet thing is just taxonomy, but do they? Do the politicians really understand that, either?
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So, the option was to either demote Pluto and have 8 planets, or promote Xena and maybe others and have 10 - 12 planets. I think the correct decision was made.
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Or the "fact" that it can be voted on in the first place.. without a quorum.
Objective definition? (Score:3, Insightful)
They demote pluto because it hasn't cleared the neighborhood of its orbit because its orbit intersects the orbit of Neptune. But doesn't this necessarily mean that Neptune has not cleared its neighborhood and therefore is also not a planet?
What does clearing the neighborhood mean? To me it suggests the planet should have no moons either?
If you are going to make a big deal and change the definition of something like this you should put a heck of a lot of thought into creating a definition that is objective and not open to interpretation.
The story so far... (Score:5, Funny)
~800 bc - Roman god of the underworld.
05-01-1930 - New planet. Also Mickey's new canine companion. Retains position as god of the underworld.
08-10-2006 - Still a planet. And a dog. Takes time off as god of the underworld to "spend more time with his new ceslestial family".
08-24-2006 - Demoted as a planet. Reclassified as a "dwarf planet" (or as they prefer to be called "Little planetiods"). Resumes job as god of the underworld.
Today - A planet again. Maybe. Title of "Roman god the the underworld" undisputed. Still a dog.
(ps. Tomorrow - Profit ???)
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wait watch (Score:2)
There just isn't any such clean divi
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but we can still divide into star and not star cleanly.
Izzat so? Brown dwarfs undergo nuclear fusion -- so why aren't they stars?
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the don't have enough mass to *sustain* nuclear fusion in their core - atleast thats what I remember learning. I mostly work on SNIa and RR Lyr so if theres been some new info on brown dwarfs its entirely possible I missed it. Though you are right brown dwarfs do represent a transition between giant planets and stars and you can see this in the HR diagram, but I still thought sustained fusion corresponds to some temperature/mass limit or is that totally wrong?
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Apologies? (Score:2)
But now 300 scientists have signed a petition to promote Pluto back to a planet. That's THIRTY more scientists than voted for the demotion in the first place!
I'm wondering how long it will be until I get an apology?
Open letter to all US scientists (Score:4, Insightful)
Humanity has arrived at an inflection point in our history, one whose influence will steer our course for decades, or, more likely, centuries. The post-millennial rise of both Islamic and Christian fundamentalism tears at the very skirts of the Enlightenment.
Your fellow citizens have twice elected an inarticulate and violent demagogue as President, a man who has expressed deep personal doubts [bbc.co.uk] about the validity of the scientific method and its relevance in America's primary-school classrooms. Three-fourths [biblicalrecorder.org] of the adult population profess a belief in angels; two-thirds [wnd.com] believe the Christian Bible is the literally-true word of their God. Over half [cbsnews.com] state that humans were created by God in their present form.
One American adult in one thousand [rrmtf.org] can state the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Meanwhile, to the elected representatives of this singularly-unenlightened population, you, America's scientists and engineers, have cheerfully handed control of several thousand thermonuclear weapons [cdi.org].
And now you're bickering endlessly about... whether or not Pluto is a planet.
Cut this shit out. Now. I don't want to live in another Dark Age, or worse, die upon the threshold of one.
Let Pluto be Pluto, whatever Pluto is, and let's put our heads together and figure out how to deal with the delusions we've created for ourselves here on Earth. We need intellectual leadership, not semantic panem et circenses.
Answers? Sorry; you're the scientists, I'm just some obviously-unlaid AC, ranting into the night on Slashdot's nickel. If I had any suggestions, believe me, I'd be making them, but I don't.
But come on. We've got to do something productive here.
misses the point (Score:3, Interesting)
The final "definitions" that they came up are not scientifically useful or even useful for any reason. No better than the previous enumeration of planets. Really a lot worse in that now by definition planets only exist in our solar system. So, all those things that orbit other stars... oh well now they are just thingies that orbit other stars. The draft proposal seemed much better by comparison and provided a much more broadly applicable definition. Hell kick pluto out of the main planets if you want, but do so by increasing some arbitrary size threshold and then don't use planet as part of the name for whatever you are left with, at least if by definition it is now not a planet or any type of planet. Even the dorky sounding "pluton" would have been better than "dwarf planet"
And you have to imagine we are going to be finding a lot more planets around other stars in the coming decades as telescopes and processing power improve. or we would have, now we can't since all we can find is something that has no category of its own, unless they too will get a two word name that includes the word planet, such as "extrasolar planet" even though the word "planet" alone is not applicable.
And the part about clearing the neighborhood of the orbit part of the definition seems like it could be problematic from an observational standpoint. The idea that even if we agree to extend this new "definition" to other star systems, then observations probably won't be sensitive enough to be able to determine if the planet-like object has cleared all the asteroids from the "neighborhood". So, until we actually go to another star system, the likelyhood of finding another object and consitently (with the definition) say that we have found a planet will be nil.
Those of you who think the problem some of us have with these problematic new definitions is merely nostalgia, think again.
Bring back the draft proposed definitions and maybe tinker with those a bit. These ones they came up with need to be thrown out.
Moo (Score:2)
Or so the bad pundits say.
What I heard... (Score:2, Interesting)
What was wrong with the first suggestion? (Score:4, Interesting)
* It is round under its own gravity
* it is not already classified as a star
* It is not a satellite to something else not classified as a star (ie. when the common point of rotation is located within the body of the other object)
A possible fourth criteria could be:
* It orbits something classified as a star
though I'd be happy without that criteria, making solitary, wandering bodies be called planets as well.
Sure, that will probably get us planets by the dozen as we get a clearer idea of what't out in the edges of our system - but why is that a problem? It's not like having nine planets has some mysterious significance, and it hasn't been nine - or eight for that matter - for very long either.
I For One.... (Score:2)
A "planet" is . . . (Score:4, Interesting)
. . . something you look at and say, "hey, that's a planet."
No, seriously. Given all the historical baggage surrounding the term "planet", people shouldn't be trying to use it as a scientific term in the first place. If you want something that can be used to scientifically denote a certain class of astronomical objects, call them "primary satellites" or something. What's wrong with saying something like this, for example? "A planet is one of the nine satellites of Sol: Mercury, Venus, Earth, ..., Pluto; or a similar object orbiting another star that is widely recognized as a planet." That keeps the status quo with respect to our solar system, which doesn't seem to have hurt anything in the 76 years it's been around, and lets public opinion decide on anything else that pops up. Which leaves astronomers free to spend their valuable time actually watching the sky rather than trying to convince people that something that looks like a planet and smells like a planet isn't actually a planet.
Americans can't stand losing out? (Score:2, Insightful)
So what do we have? A nation for which to win (keeping the planet they discovered) is more important than to have a good result overall (a solid definition of "planet" that's usable for the forseeable future). Unfortunately,
there's only one reason for all this (Score:4, Interesting)
In order to find this planet, and ensure that Lovell wasn't primarily remembered for his fanciful and incorrect thesis regarding life/civilisation on Mars, a junior astronomer was set to work searching for this suposed super giant Gas Planet.
Note that I say Junior, no-one else wanted the job, no-one....
Instead of a Huge Gas Giant, he found a tiny rock. As it turns out this was the first sighting of a Kuiper Belt Object, a noteworthy acheivement in itself which was sullied and robbed of its true importance as a milestone in astronomy due to the politics of the day within the astronomy movement.
So, this tiny rock was hailed as Lovells planet, in spite of the ludicrous nature of this claim, given the obvious disparity between the predicted object, and the one found. It could never have caused the gravitational perturbance by which the presence of the gas giant was inferred by Lovell.
It's status as a planet, whilst debated by some then, and many since, has been assured due to this fear of blackening Lovells name.
Interestingly, none of the astronomers who wanted Pluto to be a planet would consider calling our moon, or Ceres planets, even though admitting Pluto into the list of planets meant these, among others, would now qualify.
It is this bizarre situation that the decision regarding Pluto is seeking to resolve. That not many astronomers were there to vote is beside the point. The vote was known to be taking place a long time in advance (many months), it wasn't a rushed secret ballot or anything.
The people who want to discredit the vote don't actually have an alternative classification, they just want the ambiguity to remain.
In effect, what we have here is an old fashioned cat fight among supposedly mature people of science (predominantly men).
Scientific classifications change all the time... (Score:5, Insightful)
When I was a kid, there were Baltimore Orioles. Then they decided that they were really the same species as Bullock's Oriole and both of them got renamed the "Northern Oriole." Then molecular genetics studies suggested they were really all that similar and now there are Baltimore Orioles again.
My science teachers were old enough to remember when _their_ sciences teachers had said "There are ninety-two elements. There have always been ninety-two elements. There will always be ninety-two elements." And "elementary" particles? Don't get me started...
The horseshoe crab was Limulus polyphemus. Then it was Xiphosura polyphemus. Now it ''seems'' to be Limulus again... or is it?
Classification is prescientific activity. It's very important but it's always arbitrary and subject to change.
five planets (Score:3, Insightful)
Since then we've been discovering adding objects that aren't visible to the naked eye. This has taken the word out of the realm of normal folk and into the realm of science. But it's not science. It's a pretty much an arbitrary definition that really doesn't mean much to scientists one way or another - other than as a possible marketing opportunity for a pluto mission.
With the new definition of 8 (and with the old of 9) school children learn that there are 8 (or 9) planets. Why? Because the teacher said so. Yet when they dig deeper to learn about the other objects and why they aren't planets what do they find? That basically we just made up an answer that sounded like it might sound scientific.
In this day and age when science is trying to defend itself not only against the intelligent design crowd but also government funding agencies, it seems to me that this whole fiasco only makes things worse. Science claims to be the light, the truth, the way of trying not to fool ourselves. But I can't imagine this whole thing looks very "enlightened" to the general public. Probably looks more like the circus that it is.
So I say we should do science a favor and give the word back to the sky watchers and the sidewalk astronomers. Someplace where the word can actually be useful.
Devon
Royal Rumble (Score:3, Funny)
Pluto Making a Comeback (Score:3, Funny)
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Seen from outside, the solar system has two large gas planets (Jupiter, Saturn) and two small gas planets (Uranus and Neptune). If you look closely, you see two small rock planets (Earth, Venus), and various smaller debris, like Mars, Mercury and Pluto.
Regards,
--
*Art
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Re:Pluto in School (Score:4, Informative)
Quoth the wikipedia, "Mars has half the radius of the Earth and only one-tenth the mass, being less dense, but its surface area is only slightly less than the total area of Earth's dry land".
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Re:Pluto in School (Score:5, Insightful)
At least the shitty schools, anyway. Maybe your statement is an indictment on how shitty the school system is.. unfortunately, I don't think so. I understand your point that schools have alot of switching costs, and that the 9 planets concept has alot of inertia, but if scientists decide Pluto isn't a planet, then it's not a planet.. I expect my child's school to teach them that. I expect my child's school to teach my children about what real scientists do, and what real science is going on, and even about what real scientists are arguing about. Once scientists finally agree on what is a planet, and who the planets are, I expect my school to keep up. If science changes... schools are supposed to change with it. This idea that you shouldn't have to keep up with science because it's inconvinient... well, don't make me invoke the intelligent-design drama If you aren't going to teach kids the things that science agrees is correct, then what exactly _are_ you going to teach them? Whatever you feel like? Whatever you were taught?
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What's a poor school board to do? Cater to those who believe in the infallibility of Pat Robertson? Or cater to those who believe in the infallibility of a few astronomers at a conference?
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I expect my child's school to teach my children about what real scientists do, and what real science is going on, and even about what real scientists are arguing about.
>>
Then why do you care about your school teaching *astronomy*? Here's everything anyone needs to know about astronomy: space is big and mostly empty. Every once in a while, you'll find a burning ball of gas. Every once in a very long while, some rocks of various shapes and sizes. We're not sure how space got here. Some peop
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Propaganda, same as always.
KFG
Re:Pluto in School (Score:5, Funny)
Re:FP? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fine, then - have it both ways (Score:5, Funny)
The rest of the world can use the metric planets that evolved in our solar system.
There. Everyone happy now?
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The rest of the world can use the metric planets that evolved in our solar system.
There. Everyone happy now?
WTF! No! There are over 1 billion Catholics alone, whereas the population of the entire US is only a third of that.
All of the other metric Christians, Jews and other God-fearing metric people won't accept your system.
Incidentally (in reply to gp) if Pluto is so dissimilar from the rest of the planets, why don't we pick a single one of them
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Isn't Earth some of that garbage? Aren't we?
That doesn't solve the problem; we're going to have to invent lots of new words if we do that.
K.I.S.S. Call them sun-moons. Call them planets. Call them gravitationally cohesive stardust wads. All of them - comets, Pluto, 2km wide Kuiper Belt Objects, they all fit the fuzzy, historical non-objective defi
Re:Fine, then - have it both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
You're actually serious, aren't you? In what way exactly does it kick any ass? The metric systems covers lenght, volume, force... all consistent and based on one, single meter.
The "standard" (that is, the standard in the US and hardly anywhere else) is based on how many definitions for lenth etc.? How many pints of fuel are in a rocket? Would that be american pints or british dry pints or british liquid pints? How many inches go into a mile? Would that be a normal mile or a nautical one? How many ounces does a quibic yard or foot of water weigh at room temperature?
The so called (by you) "standard" system is a mess, historically grown and a nightmare to handle.
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Architecture and carpentry and the like benefit greatly from the Imperial system of measurements becase the base unit -- the foot -- is evenly divisible into halves, thirds, and quarters. This is something that's quite common when dealing with materials as ea
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Kuiper biggotry (Score:3, Interesting)
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There wasn't a definition before (Score:3, Insightful)
They didn't change the definition of a planet; there simply wasn't any precise definition of a planet before. As for all of you who want to keep with tradition, I'll refer you to my previous posting on this [slashdot.org].
If you've got a strong case why Pluto should be considered a planet, let's hear it. All this grumbling about "I don't see why they had to change things..." is rediculous. There wasn't an official definition before. That ambiguity had to change and when they drafted criteria, Pluto didn't make the cu
Pluto's smaller than our moon. Is it a planet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Geez, you make it sound like they're just some random cranks who got together. This was a meeting of the IAU. Common human consensus had tomatoes as not being fruits and dolphins as fish before people sat down and came up with a consistent definition.
Pluto's essentially grandfathered in from a time when we hadn't yet found other objects in its size class. I hope you realize that Pluto is only about 2300 km across while our own moon is about 3500 km across. Are we in a double-planet system, or is there some logical reason you can think of for making a smaller object than our moon a planet while our moon is undeserving of the status?
I think it's high-time we demoted it as nothing more than an oversized trans-Uranic asteroid. I mean, it doesn't even operate on the same elliptic plane as the planets do and it has a "moon" that's half its size. The only reason anyone cares is a knee-jerk anger over having some childhood lesson overturned.
Re:Pluto's smaller than our moon. Is it a planet? (Score:5, Funny)
Are you suggesting that witches are not actually made out of wood?
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Remember that all of this has happened before. Once upon a time, Ceres was a planet. Then other asteroids were discovered. The first few became planets too. Then astronomers realised that these were all objects from a seperate class, and redefined them not to be planets. Pluto is exactly the same. We thought it was a planet when it was the only KBO we knew. Now we know there's millio
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Originally even the Sun was classed as a planet, as was the moon, any comets that were seen, jupiter, the lot.
As a definition it's changed a lot.
In the snow. Uphill. Both ways. (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a picayune problem compared to the ones in zoological taxonomy.
Well, you know, if you applied the same standards for defining a species across the board... on the one hand half the species listed would become variants, and we'd have to consider making genus "Pan" part of genus "Homo". On the other hand, if we want to maintain the majority of the species listed as separate species then we'd have to deal with whether different ra