Is Pluto a Binary Planet? 275
astroengine writes "If the Pluto-Charon system were viewed in a similar way to binary stars and binary asteroids, Pluto would become a Pluto-Charon binary planet. After all, Charon is 12% the mass of Pluto, causing the duo to orbit a barycenter that is located above Pluto's surface. Sadly, in the IAU's haste to define what a planet is in 2006, they missed a golden opportunity to define the planetary binary. Interestingly, if Pluto was a binary planet, last week's discovery of a fifth Plutonian moon would have in fact been the binary's fourth moon to be discovered by Hubble — under the binary definition, Charon wouldn't be classified as a moon at all."
IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Interesting)
The IAU has been trying to redefine things in bulk, and then growing discontent with those definitions and changing them yet again. It's a far cry from the organization's original role: Cataloging astronomical objects. To put it in perspective, they're like a librarian that changes the layout of the indexing system weekly. They don't actually move the books around, but they rename the aisles, recategorize things, and generally make a massive mess of it all.
But then, I'd expect nothing less from a committee of pseudo-scientists; They're so engrossed with their own administrations they've become cut off from the people they're supposed to be helping.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Why do you call the committee members pseudo-scientists? I'm rather sure everyone has a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics. (I'm technically an IAU member, although I've had little involvement with it.)
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Informative)
Why do you call the committee members pseudo-scientists? I'm rather sure everyone has a PhD in astronomy/astrophysics. (I'm technically an IAU member, although I've had little involvement with it.)
They don't experiment. They don't work in a lab. They may be involved in the scientific community, but they're not doing any scientific work per-se. They're bureaucrats with training in science.
Can you specify some names so I can check this is really true?
(Not many of us astronomers work in labs or experiment anyway. We mainly obtain and analyze data, construct theoretical models. A smaller number of us work on instrumentation which might involve working in an actual lab.)
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Informative)
It would be virtually impossible to name names. The reclassification of Pluto (among other things) was the result of a vote held at the end an IAU General Assembly where only 424 out of roughly 9000 members actually voted [wikipedia.org].
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Read: 424 of 9000 were interested enough in the 'controversy' that they felt the need to be present.
That Ceres, Makemake, Pluto, Charon et an-awful-lot-of al are not planets is so obvious that I'm not surprised hardly anyone bothered.
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Well, let's be accurate. 424 out of about 1500 stayed for the last day of the 10 day gathering and were also interested enough to vote. The 7500 who didn't attend didn't get a chance to vote nor did anyone who had to leave before the last day.
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Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Informative)
Actually working astronomers do a lot of lab work. They do spend a good bit of time refining theoretical models, but a lot more time working out ways to test those models with existing laboratory equipment. Some of that equipment is now in orbit and much of the remainder is in "observatories". You know, research laboratories with telescopes instead of microscopes.
Astronomers are also a very resourceful bunch who are continually looking for ways to test their theories against laboratory observations that have already been done. If you can find what you need to test a hypothesis in last year's download of Hubble material, or the digitized images of telescopic photos taken in the 1930s, that still counts as laboratory research.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:4, Interesting)
Working astronomer here (radio, ground-based). I spend about 2-3 weeks per year actually at an observatory. That's roughly typical in this field, though there's a lot of variation: some people work more on the engineering side and spend 90% of their time on-site, while pure theoreticians might never see a telescope.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Informative)
The IAU, both committee and members, is made up of active scientists who do the bureaucratic stuff in addition to their research jobs. That is how professional organizations usually work, the people running them are doing community duty above and beyond their paid employment.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
The only reason the Pluto stuff (and the IAU) has gotten so much attention and ranting is that an American discovered Pluto and a bunch of patriots got butthurt that 'europeans' were taking away their thunder.
When there is ambiguity, professional and standards organizations redefine stuff all the time. This was a pretty routine thing to do and would have gone completely under the radar if nationalism had not come into play and got people fired up. In the end, they couldn't keep Pluto as a 'planet' without including a significant number of other bodies, which would have pissed off people too.
But like many issues, the original energy behind the backlash has been pretty much lost on the people who continue to push it today....which was part of the point. You can wrap up all sorts of nationalistic bullshit if you tie it into other existing narratives that appeal to the same people... think of the children, elitists forcing things on the public.. plays to the same audience and plays well off even less knowledge of the issue.
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He isn't completely gone. He just looks smaller, now that you're all grown up.
The good news is he may have a twin brother, so you get two dogs for the price of one.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Funny)
But then, I'd expect nothing less from a committee of pseudo-scientists
You, sir, have very low expectations for the noble profession of pseudo-science. I both demand and expect a whole lot more from my committees of space pseudo-scientists:
1. At least three separate and conflicting theories about the catastrophic formation of the solar system as a result of an interplanetary war between four and eight thousand years ago.
2. A dozen formulations of the Lorentz Contraction as a result of the pre-Einsteinian ether
3. A gigantic laser mounted on Mimas [wikipedia.org]
4. A baroque dying Martian civilisation clustered in glorious decadent splendour among the Red Weed entwined canals and pentagonal pyramids of Cydonia.
5. Ancient space Egyptians and Mayans with lasercats.
6. Space Mormons versus robots.
7. A literary analysis of Shakespeare's Hamlet as really being about the precession of the equinoxes.
8. An apocalyptic prediction involving Halley's Comet.
9. An Electric Universe theory, preferably one that makes Saturn a former star.
10. A homebuilt antigravity demonstration device harnessing the awesome power of magnets.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Informative)
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It's a far cry from the organization's original role: Cataloging astronomical objects.
Um, no. Deciding upon definitions is an absolutely necessary part of doing precisely that job.
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It's all about consensual science. It's what the majority believe. Pluto is not a planet, all that junk is just debris. It is also a shifting science in that if you can change consensus you can change the facts.
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That'd be kind of cool. The solar system really is very disorderly when you think about it - particularly Pluto with its lopsided orbit. They should fix that. And maybe sort them by size while they're at it.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Funny)
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Most do not view holy books as literal truth like religious fundamentalists, but rather guidelines and proverbs on the meaning behind life and how to live it well. Nor do they believe in creationism and other pseudoscience. But there are a
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A christian scientist I can accept.
A Christian Scientist is a synonym for "total idiot". If the one-way Mars missions weren't so horribly expensive, I would add them to the list of pseudo-scientists I'd love to send on a one-way mission to really anything that's far enough away to guarantee the "one-way" part.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Astronomical knowledge is evolving quite a bit faster than the rest of the library. I'm not necessarily saying that any IAU decisions are correct but I don't see anything fundamentally wrong with recategorizing. Isn't it that a hallmark of the intelligent?
No. I can write a computer algorithm to sort something; that doesn't make it intelligent. Anyone can make something more complicated -- true genius is making things simpler.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Interesting)
true genius is making things simpler.
Or rather, true genius is making things as simple as they can be but no simpler.
Speaking as an amateur, it seems that adding the 'minor planet' category was a reasonable decision. Charon & Pluto are distinct from asteroids, but quite a lot smaller than the rest of the bodies we call planets.
In other fields, we distinguish between islets and islands, streams and rivers, bushes and trees, etc etc etc. Not to add complexity, but to more fully describe reality.
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The one reasonable definition, it's big enough to pull itself into a ball, would yield over 50 planets in our solar system alone.
Even if the definition is that + it's in orbit around the sun and not a larger planet, you still have tons extra.
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Yes, we should not have just planets, but both planets and planetets, that will make it simpler. Then, if we later find smaller planetoids, we can call them planetetets.
See, I am a great genius, I have made things simpler.
Re:IAU? Haste? No way. (Score:5, Interesting)
No, it's a hallmark of the bored with too much free time. If you had an employee who spent most of their time recategorizing rather than coming up with something new, would you consider them intelligent? You'd probably think they were lazy or incompetent.
The implication here is that people just got bored and changed things, but really it's just like the planet-to-asteroid naming change in the 1800s. People find a new planet (Ceres/Pluto), and after a while find a whole lot of similar objects. You probably don't want to learn a whole lot of asteroid or KBO names.
Added to this, our notions of Pluto have gradually dwindled from a huge pitch-dark planet, able to perturb the mighty Neptune in its orbit, down to a small bright billiard ball with a gravitational pull only slightly bigger than that of yo' mama.
Yes? (Score:3)
As closely as they orbit each other, I'd say Pluto-Charon would be almost the example of such a system. Heck, it's almost a Rocheworld. :p
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As closely as they orbit each other, I'd say Pluto-Charon would be almost the example of such a system.
Close? It's precisely because Charon is so far away[*] that the barycenter is outside Pluto's surface. If it had been closer, the barycenter would have been inside Pluto.
If it had been closer, you would call it a moon, but because it's further away you call it a binary system? That doesn't make sense to me.
[*] Almost twice as far away from its barycenter as Phobos is from its barycenter inside Mars, for example.
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Agree: the Barycentre definition is poor (Score:3)
You could argue that Sun-Jupiter is some kind of Binary, based on that definition. You need something that enforces a near-equal mass - and by near-equal, maybe order of magnitude mass. Whether you write that as it, or abstract it - like having the barycentre greater that ?.2*orbital radii(or semi-major axis) from either planet.
The truth is, we don't have any closely-studyable examples of something we would really describe as a binary planet. Some asteroids are in binary systems, I think, but nothing substa
Sun is the same way (Score:5, Informative)
The barycenter of the Sun/Jupiter system lies at 1.07 solar radii from the Sun's core (i.e. outside the Sun). Is the Sun a binary star?
For those curious, the barycenter of the Earth/Moon system is well inside the Earth, despite the Moon relatively energetic orbit.
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Wouldn't Jupiter need to be a star? Short of us igniting it, I think that is going to be a problem.
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Well, it does radiate more energy than it gets from the Sun...
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Jupiter may already be burning; if there was a self-sustaining nuclear reaction at its core, that would explain some of its puzzling activity. The idea of brown dwarf stars is not a new one: stars that do not emit much if any visible light, but pump out heat and particles.
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Jupiter may already be burning; if there was a self-sustaining nuclear reaction at its core, that would explain some of its puzzling activity.
That would cause many more problems (particularly in nuclear theory) than it solves. Jupiter's heat output is easily explained by gravitational binding energy.
The idea of brown dwarf stars is not a new one: stars that do not emit much if any visible light, but pump out heat and particles.
"Brown dwarf star" is not a thing. Brown Dwarves are by definition sub-stellar objects. They are not massive enough to sustain fusion reactions. The current definition puts the minimum mass much higher than Jupiter, though the boundary between brown dwarf and large planet is a fuzzy one. The boundary between brown dwarf and star, however, is muc
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Wouldn't Jupiter need to be a star? Short of us igniting it, I think that is going to be a problem.
You could consider it a brown dwarf, if you could get the IAU to lower the minimum brown dwarf classification mass.
Re:Sun is the same way (Score:5, Informative)
If the mass part counts at all (Charon being 12% of Pluto's mass), Jupiter is a far smaller fraction of the Sun's mass (something like 0.1% if I did the math right).
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After all, Charon is 12% the mass of Pluto
The barycenter of the Sun/Jupiter system [..] Is the Sun a binary star?
Jupiter is less than 0.1% the mass of the Sun
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Depends on how do you define the radius of the Sun.
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Most people would consider the radius of the Sun to end where the mass of burning fusion ends, which is fairly constant except for solar flares... though I do get your point. If we include the atmosphere in our calculation of the solar radius, then Jupiter is actually within the heliosphere.
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Sorry, this is wrong. Fusion only occurs in the core. The radius of the son is considered to be the photosphere, even though it is acknowledged that the corona (sun's "atmosphere") extends far beyond that.
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Most people would consider the radius of the Sun to end where the mass of burning fusion ends, which is fairly constant except for solar flares... though I do get your point.
If you did that, the solar radius would be 25-30% of the accepted definition!
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Yes, the Earth/Moon barycenter is within the earth - right now. But the moon recedes, currently around 2.2 cm per year, which means that the barycenter is going to be outside the earth's surface in a few thousand million years.
And this is what's wrong with using the barycenter as part of judging whether it's a binary system or a moon - the further away the two objects are, the further away from the heavier object the barycenter will be. So you can have two identical planets with two identical satellites,
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Some people also consider the Earth/Moon to be a binary planet. The Sun's hold on the moon is actually greater than the Earth's, and so if you were looking at the Moon's path in the solar system it is always concave to the Sun. The path of any other moon in the solar system is sort of zigzaggy, sometimes moving towards the Sun and sometimes away, depending on its location relative to its planet.
Wikipedia probably explains it better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_planet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbi
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As far as I know, the question of whether Jupiter is producing energy through some core fusion or fission process remains unresolved. Jupiter might well be reclassified as not a planet, but as a dwarf brown star.
So perhaps we are in a binary star system.
Furthermore, the Earth's orbit is so strongly perturbed by the Moon that the time of perihelion shifts over more than 24 hours from year to year, depending on where the Moon is in its orbit on Jan 3 through 5. This is an angular variance of about 1 degre
Now it makes sense (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Now it makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Now it makes sense (Score:5, Funny)
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Ugh. The entire idea of the 'death star' shows how little imagination Lucas has. Even moving the death star into a system would effect the planetary orbits. Why would you need a big laser gun when you can simply wobble a planet out of its habitable orbit using the gravity of your space station.
Wouldn't take much, if you pick the right resonant orbit and aren't in a hurry .. ;)
Re:Now it makes sense (Score:5, Informative)
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I have to agree. It was a pretty good analysis except for that line which really doesn't fit or make sense. After all, we're talking about a spacegoing civilization that has faster-than-light engines, not to mention some absurdly large capital ships. I don't see how having engines capable of moving the Death Star is even remotely as absurd as the whole idea of a death star by itself, with a giant laser, and also ships that can travel FTL and have artificial gravity (even the tiny Millenium Falcon had art
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I have to agree. It was a pretty good analysis except for that line which really doesn't fit or make sense. After all, we're talking about a spacegoing civilization that has faster-than-light engines, not to mention some absurdly large capital ships. I don't see how having engines capable of moving the Death Star is even remotely as absurd as the whole idea of a death star by itself, with a giant laser, and also ships that can travel FTL and have artificial gravity (even the tiny Millenium Falcon had artificial gravity inside).
Exactly. One should also assume within this sci-fi context, that such an advanced and old cluster of civilizations that made up the Start Wars universe would also have the know-how for synthesizing lighter, stronger material, stronger and lighter than the stuff today's carriers are made of. Currently we know of extremely strong and light materials, kevlar, obscenely strong ceramics and polymers, boron nitrate, diamons (heterodiamonds in particular), carbon nanotubes, spider silk, titanium diborites, boron n
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"The Death Star was so massive that when it orbited a planet it became a binary system."
But of course it's a binary system: that's no moon.
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That one wasn't finished with construction however, so of course it was mostly hollow.
Of course, this makes me wonder, if having as much of it complete as they did was sufficient to have the giant laser working (as the rebels found out the hard way), then what'd they need the rest of it (the unfinished portion) for? Just to look good? To have lots more offices for bureaucrats? To have more hangar bays full of TIE fighters to defend against rebel ships too small to easily hit with the giant laser?
Barycenter based definition has issues (Score:5, Informative)
Pluto never was a planet (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Pluto never was a planet (Score:4, Insightful)
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The kids aren't as bad as their parents are.
Re:Pluto never was a planet (Score:5, Informative)
"Is it something more personal between individuals in astronomy?"
This, actually. Long story short, there are two camps of astronomers. One of them characterizes bodies based on where they're orbiting, the other characterizes bodies based off what they're made of.
The former pushed this through as an act of political dickmanship on the last day of a conference (after most participants had gone home), in a only tangentially related addition to a talk scheduled for a different topic, breaking IAU rules to do so. It's not a 'scientific' decision, it's a purely political one.
And any definition that has a category 'dwarf planet' that isn't a subset of 'planet' is about as stupid as redefining 'car' so that 'electric cars' are no longer a subset of 'cars'.
Re:Pluto never was a planet (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Pluto never was a planet (Score:4, Insightful)
Likewise the compostional argument works in favor of demotion as well. Working outward we have rocky inner planets, two gas giants, two ice giants, and then a buttload of comparitively very tiny solid icy bodies, that when they get perturbed and wander closer, get called comets. I don't understand the emotion behind the debate.
The best idea of what to do with the planet definition I've seen so far is to scrap it. Planets are originally things that move about in the sky. Now it's used for something or other because we're not comfortable with the now thousands of planets that exist under the old definition.
There are several problems with the kinds of planets you mentioned. Currently a planet is (in practice): 1) A rocky round body OR 2) A large gaseous body OR 3) A large gaseous "icy" body. The problem being that if you take a large KBO, Mercury and Jupiter, the two planets certainly will not have the most in common (radii about 1000, 2500 and 69000 km, respectively.) It's possible to build a definition that includes only eight planets, but it will give you a collection of bodies that have nothing else in common.
The planet definition is temporary in any case since it specifically doesn't apply outside the Sol system. I think the science should really throw it away as far as it can, so that the public can use the word however it wants without science being disturbed, while astronomers could stop playing unnecessary politics.
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That, and the one camp likes cats more than dogs.
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First -- what you have said has nothing to do with the question of why people are so stuck on Pluto. I think this comes down to people not understanding science. They think science is "right", which is good, but of course "early" science is often wrong. There is a whole hierarchy of confidence levels, and things of low confidence often turn out to be wrong -- like the long-disproven notion that Pluto is a 9th body much "like" the other 8 planets. Turns out Pluto is just the largest Kuiper belt object a
Re:Pluto never was a planet (Score:5, Insightful)
To say it "never was a planet" is not quite true. It never was a planet according to the definition of planet that we use now, but it was a planet according to the definition we used to use. If you change the definition, people are going to be confused. It has nothing to do with tradition (except insofar as language is a "tradition"), and everything to do with the alteration of the language. Now, that alteration may be fully scientifically justified and acceptable... but it's still going to annoy people.
The comparison with the geocentrism is a little faulty. The issue here has very little to do with our knowledge of reality changing (it didn't really), but with the way we look at that reality changing (i.e. the words used for a thing).
It's not science, it's linguistics. The result is even now what category Pluto falls into can be debated: we could quite easily call it a planet even now, the problem is the definition would be too wide and force us to call things planets not traditionally called planets. So somewhat contrary to your point, a large part of the reason Pluto isn't called a planet anymore is actually tradition: because we don't want to call all the Kuiper belt objects planets also.
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It's even weirder when you consider that even now, the IAU agrees that Pluto is a dwarf planet. It's just that their change was to make it so that a dwarf planet is not called a planet. It's a very, very odd linguistic or logical choice to make and yet you can find information online about some of the rather severe political tactics used to ensure the change was made.
Re:Pluto never was a planet, under any definition. (Score:2)
If, in 1930, we knew that Pluto was that small, and there was that many other kuiper belt objects out there, we would never have named a 9th planet. Just like we would never have named the first asteroids the 9th, 10th and 11th planets if we knew the situation when we found them.
But we miscalculated Pluto's mass based on a theory that was found to be based on incorrect math, and didn't know that Kuiper belt existed, so made a mistake. Opps, our bad, fixed now.
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My Very Easy Memory Jingle.... (Score:2)
Seems Useless Now?
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Now that you mention children - my five year old is in denial. He still insists that Pluto is a planet. Even if the reclassification was just before he was born. The set of plastic planets hanging from his ceiling (his first ever Solar System experience) included Pluto, and no new library book or educational dinner table placemat since has managed to convince him otherwise.
I'm sure he would be far less upset after l
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Everyone's pissed because they were taught as kids that there were 9 planets in the Solar System, and that the last one had the same name as one of their favority Disney characters. So they're mad that it's been demoted to "dwarf planet", even though they never had a problem before with Ceres being classified that way, and Ceres is much, much closer to us.
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Re:And apparently nor is Neptune (Score:4, Interesting)
... since the orbit of Pluto crosses that of Neptune and therefore Neptune has not cleared out its region of space yet, and probably never will.
No, the orbit of Pluto never crosses that of Neptune. Really. Sometimes Pluto is closer to the sun than Neputune is, but the two orbits never cross. You have to think in 3D here.
But "clearing the orbit" is a stupid argument, nevertheless. By that measure, we have one planet in the solar system, and that's Mercury. All the others have various debris floating around in their orbits, especially near the Lagrange points 30 degrees ahead of and behind them.
And Mars wouldn't compete for a planetary title at all - its orbit is mostly clear because of Jupiter and Earth, not itself - it's just too small to keep its orbit clear on its own.
I think the actual reasoning behind demoting Pluto is that a camp of astronomers want a fixed number. So you take the classic planets known since the antique, and add Uranus and Neptune because they're too friggin' big to be ignored, and leave it at that. Then you make up rules that would pass your eight and block any others.
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The 3:2 orbital resonance and relatively high inclination of Pluto's orbit guarantees it's never close to Neptune. The orbits DON'T CROSS, Pluto is well out of the ecliptic plane when its orbit comes closer than that of Neptune. From the point of view of Neptune, it still has the orbit all to itself. This is somewhat similar to Trojan asteroids [wikipedia.org] and Jupiter. Though they share the same rough path around the sun, the asteroids stay clustered around points 60 degrees ahead of and behind Jupiter. They're never c
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Even if you include Pluto among the detritus in Neptune's orbit, it still doesn't add up to anything significant. Take a look at the sugestion of a 'planitary descriminator', a ratio of mass of the object and the mass or other things in it's orbit, and, depending on which one, other factors like orbital radius. Regardless of which formula you choose, The planets are all huge numbers, and dwarf planets less than one. The gap is huge. Many even rank Pluto below the asteroids.
And you could argue that it is Nep
Definition (Score:3)
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and the components of the system are similar in size and/or mass.
How similar is "similar"?
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You've now created a new classification by omission. What about formerly binary star systems where one entity far more massive? I like your definition though.
No (Score:4, Informative)
Because Pluto is not a planet.
Binary dwarf planets, sure. That seems a reasonable argument. But even treating Pluto and Charon as a single entity can't upgrade them to planet status.
Is Pluto a Binary Planet? (Score:2)
No. Pluto is a dog [wikipedia.org].
off-topic (Score:4, Insightful)
What I love about /. is that a topic like this can get almost 200 comments (at the time of this posting).
Most of my friends, even the geekier ones, would go "uh, ok, so what?". Because today "geek" has become to be limited to computers and that was never the gist of it until recently.
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Except that, as of now, the *definition* of a planet involves "an orbit [...] free of other large objects". So that's like saying "the Moon would qualify as a planet if it orbited the Sun instead of the Earth", or more succinctly, "Pluto would be a planet if it weren't for the things that make it not a planet".
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No, "exoplanet" is for planets which orbit other stars. What you're thinking of is a "rogue planet", which is a planet that doesn't have a star and just floats through interstellar or intergalactic space. These of course are only theorized.
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No, the problem is that if you make being a spheroid sufficient to call an object a "planet" (that, and orbiting the Sun rather than another planet), then instead of 9 planets, suddenly you get a bunch more because you'll have to reclassify the other spheroid sun-orbiting objects (now called "dwarf planets") as full-fledged planets, including Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake. Don't forget a few other: Orcus, Quaoar, Sedna, and 2007 OR10, which may very well be classified dwarf planets soon, and there's pr
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No, they wouldn't. They'd be "dwarf planets", at least most of them would, they're really not that large. Even Titan is only half as massive as Mercury (though it has larger volume), so I'm not sure where it'd rank according to the current definition.
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It is not *the* definition, it is a *stupid* definition.
As Abe once said, calling a tail a leg does not make it a leg; the dog still has only four legs.
The IAU coming up with a generally useless new definition for a word that is very much in common usage with a different meaning only shows that the IAU is capable of tremendous hubris, and is not in the service of increasing or distributing knowledge. Quite the opposite.
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And can we please now get back to important things like arguing about whether C is a low level language?
OK, just for you. :D Here goes:
Of course it is a low level language. It was described (by Ritchie, if memory serves - in any case one of the authors/designers) as "a structured PDP-11 macro assembler". I would argue that, by definition, any 'assembler' is a low-level language. I would go farther - any language in which the primary semantics and syntax of the language is closely aligned with the physical movements of data through memory, and operations upon that data, is a low level language - freely adm
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If it had higher density than water, it would sink, and not sail at all. All boats must have lower density than the medium on which they sail.
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Oops. Someone failed Percentages. The mass of the moon is a bit less than 1/80th of Earth's mass. Or 0.0123, which is 1.23%.
The Moon is also about 5 times Pluto's mass, and around 50 times Charon's estimated mass. If Charon gets to be a planet, the Moon should be too. (And the Galilean moons, and Titan...)
Yes. It wasn't difficult to kill planet pluto (Score:2)
It is the experts WHO DECIDE what a planet is and they simply got around to doing it and it did not take them much effort to kill off pluto; most the hype is the non experts who must be connecting it with the cartoon dog pluto and are reacting as if somebody killed a dog or the cartoon pluto. Or maybe people are just that stubborn to changes in their knowledge?
It is just a rock that ignorantly was called a planet and upon further examination and advances in science is no longer a planet. Get over it! Its