Pluto Regains Its Title As Largest Object In Its Neighborhood 138
sciencehabit writes "In 2005 astronomers discovered Pluto's biggest neighborhood rival: Eris, which they claimed definitely surpassed Pluto in size. Now, as astronomers report an analysis of methane gas in Pluto's atmosphere suggests that Pluto is about 2368 kilometers across, in which case it's larger than Eris and thus the champ of the Edgeworth-Kuiper belt, which boasts more than a thousand known objects revolving around the sun beyond Neptune's orbit."
Ah, the Planet Pluto (Score:4, Insightful)
I remember it well -- before the anti Pluto is a Planet conspiracy. Good to see it's getting some recognition, rather than more damnation.
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I remember it well -- before the anti Pluto is a Planet conspiracy. Good to see it's getting some recognition, rather than more damnation.
The whole "We changed our mind and decided that Pluto isn't a planet" is bullshit. Just say that Pluto and Eris are both planets and be done with it.
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But you don't have a problem with Ceres no longer being a planet?
Typical orbitist prejudice.
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I have no problem with Ceres being a planet, too.
What is that bickering about calling some rocks planets and not others? Do they get some kind of government pension for being planets like them being some sort of veterans or what's the big deal?
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Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto (Score:4, Informative)
Because the definition of what is a planet changed. For no good reason at all.
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By the way, there was a time, when it was the {Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus} set, as Ceres was discovered in 1801, and Neptune in 1846. Ceres got thrown out, and Neptune was included. And no one was complaining about arbitrarily changing a non-existant definition.
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Except that only Ceres is big enough to have become a spheroid under the pressure of its own gravity. Which is actually a pretty significant feature (unlike the orbit nonsense), and a fairly solid reason for putting something in a separate category from "random rock".
Vesta was actually on the bubble for a while. Despite the big chunk missing from one side, the final decision about whether it would be a dwarf planet or asteroid wasn't made until the Dawn mission gave us a better close-up look.
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The whole "We changed our mind and decided that Pluto isn't a planet" is bullshit. Just say that Pluto and Eris are both planets and be done with it.
Define "planet" in a meaningful, non-arbitrary way that does not include dozens of other bodies not traditionally recognized as planets in our solar system (e.g. Ceres). It's believed the Kuiper belt has hundreds of dwarf planets. You want to promote them all just to not have to give up a mnemonic from childhood?
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Sure. All objects named after the God of The Underworld and radioactive elements Shalt Be Planets.
It's not arbitrary either because I say so.
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Its as arbitrary as declaring Pluto not to be a planet.
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Anything that orbits the Sun directly in a fairly circular orbit is a planet. Why shouldn't Ceres be one?
And with stuff like Wikipedia, who the hell needs to remember something like that? If you really need to do a classification, go for the time of their discovery, i.e. split them up in 3 groups, the "ancient" ones (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Satur), the "modern" ones (Uranus, Ceres, Neptune) and the "new" ones (everything since).
Where's the big deal?
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Yes! Why shouldn't it be a planet too. It costs the same.
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Anything that orbits the Sun directly in a fairly circular orbit is a planet. Why shouldn't Ceres be one?
Do comets count? How "off" of an orbit do you have to be not to count (and yet for Pluto to count).
Where's the big deal?
Where's the big deal in Pluto not being a planet?
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> Do comets count?
The distinction between comets and asteroids is no longer scientifically valid. By composition, comets and outer Solar System bodies are the same. Comets just happen to have orbits that get so close to the Sun they evaporate water and other ices and create a tail. There are intermediate bodies in the asteroid belt and out to about Saturn that give off just a little outgassing, but not enough to create a full tail. "Dead comets" have comet-like orbits, but no longer have any volatile
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The big deal with Pluto not being a planet is simply that we have to pull together a whole lot of arbitrary definitions to exclude it. Which may turn into a whole different set of nightmares (like, say, "orbital clearing". What about the Trojans? Is Jupiter no planet anymore now? Or do the other objects in the orbit have to have a certain size compared to the "main" body to be considered "negligible"? How much mass compared to the main body may they have? Or do they have to be independent (i.e. not at a Lag
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No.
The big deal with Pluto not being a planet, is that it was discovered by an American, and Americans are butthurt over losing the "credit" for discovering a Planet.
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I don't give a shit who discovered it. I have to admit, until now I didn't even know who discovered it.
I'm not an American (by neither definition). My reason to want to include Pluto (and, for that matter, Ceres) in the list of planets is that it would create a simpler, more elegant definition of planet that is less dependent on future discoveries. With the current definition (especially the "cleared the orbit" bit), planets are just planets so long 'til we find something in their orbit that they haven't cl
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a mnemonic from childhood?
Mary's "Virgin" Excuse Made Joseph Suspect Upstairs Neighbour.
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PLUTO- NEVER FORGET!
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Don't forget Sedna and Quaoar. and Makemake, and Varuna and...
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Ah yes.. Eris. Let us STRIVE over it.
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But ... wouldn't damnation be fitting with something named Pluto?
Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto (Score:5, Informative)
1) With the discovery of the other clutter that could be considered within Pluto's orbit, it means that any consistent definition of a planet would either not include Pluto, would include Ceres, or would not include Mercury. After some bickering and debate, the guys who run the telescopes decided to start calling Pluto a dwarf planet, and toss Ceres, Eris, and a couple dozen other big rocks into that bucket.
2) 'Kilo' is the metric prefix for 1000, not 1024. There already was confusion between an OS's kilobyte and a storage manufacturer's kilobyte. Kibibyte is a lame hack to try to instill some semblance of binary order in a scenario where marketing will trump all such efforts.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting.
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2) 'Kilo' is the metric prefix for 1000, not 1024. There already was confusion between an OS's kilobyte and a storage manufacturer's kilobyte. Kibibyte is a lame hack to try to instill some semblance of binary order in a scenario where marketing will trump all such efforts.
Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes. It has been a while though.
I now return you to your regularly scheduled ranting.
Thank you, you are most considerate. :^)
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Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes. It has been a while though.
Do you mean floppy disk manufacturers, who thought that a megabyte = 1000*1024?
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a kilobyte means 1000 bytes. A kibi means 1024 bytes.
Since binary is powers of 2., anyone who actually understand computers understand why kibi byte is more accurate and proper for the industry.
"...used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes"
No, it wan't correct, they where wrong Since it was how you used it when you learned it., you are emotional unable to come to terms with the accurate version.
And the name kibi is the result of decades of confusion, and concern that is old then the PC.
No, no,
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a kilobyte means 1000 bytes.
That depends on what you think "means" means.
If I told a room full of people with a background in IT that my file was exactly one kilobyte, I'm pretty sure the vast majority would take me to mean, sans further information, 1024 bytes.Yes, kibibyte is unambiguous. But in most circumstances it's not that helpful to start throwing around obscure terms for the sake of avoiding the slim possibility of misinterpretation.
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But in most circumstances it's not that helpful to start throwing around obscure terms for the sake of avoiding the slim possibility of misinterpretation.
"Slim possibility"? Seriously? Some hardware types use the 1024 definition, while others use the 1000 definition. When talking about data transfer speed and other contexts "kilo" means 1000. (Bits, despite being the ultimate binary unit, seem to come in 1000s, while groups of 8 of them come in 1024s -- why?) Some software and OSes use 1024 (e.g. Windows); others use 1000 (e.g. many commands in Linux).
Yes, it's possible to navigate all these conflicting standards to have a general sense of when the pr
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But if you asked those same people how big one second of CD music (44.1 kHz, 16 bits/sample) is how many would answer 88.2 kB instead of ~86.13 kB? And how long does it take to transfer 100 MB over a 100 Mbit Ethernet connection, excluding overhead? Hint: If you answer 8 seconds, you're off by about 0.39 seconds. Really if you're on such a low level that the distinction matters, most people in IT would get it wrong. Personally I find the abbreviations useful for clarity, but I refuse to use the silly names.
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Some of us remember when storage manufacturers still used the correct definition of kilobytes and megabytes.
No, you don't.
The earliest mass storage devices all used powers of 10 definitions, just like hard drives do today. With very few exceptions that was the consistent approach up until the introduction of the floppy disk. When 8" floppies hit the market, IBM stuck with powers of 10, but DEC began using powers of two. When 5.25" floppies showed up all of the manufacturers -- including IBM -- had shifted to powers of two. This made sense because they all had sector sizes that were powers of two.
But then came
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In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?
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Why is it so hard for you aspyrons to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on context?
Well, maybe because almost all the international standards organizations actually agree that there's a single meaning now (even though they disagreed in the past).
In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?
Look, what the GP said was factually accurate:
the IEEE, ISO and SI standards all agree that kilobyte means 1000 bytes, and megabyte means 1000000 bytes.
The IEC adopted these in 1998 [nist.gov], leading to full adoption by the IEEE in 2005 [wikipedia.org]. SI explicitly defines [bipm.org] kilo ONLY to mean 1000, and though bytes are not technically SI units, they regard any other use of the prefixes as incorrect.
The only large body that has endorsed the use of your system in the past de
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You appear to believe that argument from authority trumps sense. You have it backwards.
First off, I was merely pointing out that GP's statements were factually accurate, and therefore did not deserve ridicule. I said you have the choice to ignore those recommendations by standards organizations if you want. Go ahead. But if you want to argue from a system of logic rather than authority, you may want to reconsider your methods.
Secondly, you have it backwards [ath0.com] and believe in some mythical authority that never was consistent. If you actually were correct about 1024 being used in ALL cases o
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The link you posted is actually not that bad an essay on the subject, although I disagree with his conclusions at least he's mostly accurate and aboveboard on his logic.
But you are completely misunderstanding me if you think I am appealing to any nonexistent authority or denying that people use these terms in confusing and incorrect ways on a regul
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You may have a different opinion on those issues and you have a right to that, but you dont have a right to force me to agree.
Absolutely. I acknowledged that in both of my replies to you. My main beef was mainly with the lack of respect and civility -- you want to disagree? Fine. But in doing so, you accused GP of being like hardware manufacturers who deliberately sought to confuse people, and implicitly dismissed the citations of major international standards organizations who advocate the GP's position. You wanna have a different opinion? Fine. But there's no reason to go around insulting people, particularly when they ci
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If my reply was rude, so was that post, because I did nothing but mirror it back.
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And some memory manufacturers, and some processor manufacturers, and some integrated peripheral manufacturers, etc.
Let me know where 65.536 kilobit RAM or ROM in an 8.192k x 8 bit format is advertised. I am also in the market for a DMA controller which supports a 65.536 kilobyte address space.
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the guys who run the telescopes decided to start calling Pluto a dwarf planet
NO.
Some guys decided to start calling it a Dwarf Planet, after pretty much everyone else attending the IAU had gone home. They conspired to hold a meeting, without a full quorum and voted these BS standards into place. As disgusting a fixing of science as any effing millionaire/billionaire trying to rewrite school textbooks with whatever they personally would rather the youth of the nation end up spouting.
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Well, that's a complete lie.
Moron
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Well, that's a complete lie.
Moron
How is it a lie? [bbc.co.uk]
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and toss Ceres, Eris, and a couple dozen other big rocks
Nobody tosses a dwarf!
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Seriously.
Pluto is a fucking planet. All the morons who herpderp about it not meeting the "requirements" for being a planet need to STFU. Any "requirements" are arbitrarily-defined. Pluto was a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time. To later redefine the already arbitrary term is absurd. If you don't like the term planet, make a new term. Don't change an existing term that has widespread common and technical use, has been used in publications, etc. All you do is create ambiguity with regards to what definition someone means when they use the term. The same shit goes for "kibibytes" - you don't have to like kilobytes being 1024 bytes, but you do have to accept it. Adding "kibibytes" just creates confusion where there was none before.
Correct, the only designation of planet that is questionable is for Earth. That's just a big rock littered with assholes.
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First off, Pluto was originally called a planet back before all of the objects that are in the same orbit as Pluto were spotted, thus under the definition that a planet must clear its orbit fails. Second if kilobytes are so clear and unambiguous, why do hard drive manufacturers consider them 1000 bytes when all computer scientists and programmers consider them 1024? http://www.glyphtech.com/suppo... [glyphtech.com]
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kilo = 1000. From before computer existed. You may not have realized it, but 1000x1024 produces a completely different number then 1024x1024. I know, shocking.
So to say a kilo is 1024 in the computer industry is inaccurate and misleading.
What we need was a name for 1024, which we now have.
Are you seriously saying we should re-define the metric system?
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Some people know that human language is context sensitive and adjust their expectations of meaning conforming to context. WTF is wrong with KB meaning 1024 bytes? The only problem was hard disk manufacturers and their BS propaganda. No one else uses their definition.
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The only problem was hard disk manufacturers and their BS propaganda. No one else uses their definition.
Well, only them and just about every international standards body that actually defines units, including engineering and electronics bodies (e.g. IEEE, JEDEC still allows something like the old 1024 standard, but notes it is deprecated).
Also, various other hardware manufacturers, various software (e.g. many Linux commands), data transfer rates and other things measured in bits rather than bytes, etc., etc.
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WTF is wrong with KB meaning 1024 bytes?
If it were just KB, that would only be somewhat annoying and confusing, like US vs imperial pints.
But when you introduce binary MB and GB they all have to be mixed, and it becomes absolutely infuriating. It makes doing the math to figure out how much stuff will fit on a drive almost as hard as using Roman numerals.
You're basically changing the radix of your numbers depending on their magnitude, for no good reason. (Disk drives have never had any capacity factor physically based on any power of two.) That's
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Pluto IS a planet. By the very definition of planet, deriving from the Greek aster planetes, meaning "wandering star". And it is about as much a wandering star as any other planet.
So either it is a planet or none of the other planets it a planet. Make your choice.
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In fact, actual astronomers refer to all the solid objects that orbit the Sun as "planets". The come in three sizes: major planet, dwarf planet, and minor planet. The IAU Minor Planet Center ( http://www.minorplanetcenter.n... [minorplanetcenter.net] ) tracks all those things otherwise known as "asteroids".
The exact dividing lines are:
Major Planet - Round, and massive enough to have "cleared" it's orbit of other large object (it's the dominant mass in it's orbital region)
Dwarf Planet - Round, but has not cleared it's orbit, thus
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It seems to me there should be a fourth category: gas giants. They are considered planets, but there's more differences between Earth and Uranus than there are between Mars and Pluto.
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It seems to me there should be a fourth category: gas giants. They are considered planets, but there's more differences between Earth and Uranus than there are between Mars and Pluto.
To add to the confusion, Uranus and Neptune are sometimes considered "ice giants," since their composition is so significantly different than Jupiter and Saturn.
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Sometimes, a definition really loses its meaning if applied too literally.
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Ok, you win with Sun and Moon. Though I'd say the movement of an object has to be observable within sensible time spans, i.e. stars don't really "move" with respect to a human lifetime.
Aside of that I'd have to concede. But the current definition of planet is not useful either, since "clearing the orbit" is a term that has been applied very arbitrarily. Or, to quote Stern, leader of the New Horizon Mission, "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wasn't there". Add some Trojans and NEAs and Jupiter and even
bogus claim (Score:2)
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Actually, Uranus is, barely, visible to the naked eye. But most people avoided looking at it, for obvious reasons.
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So the experts need to STFU so a non expert like yourself can feel good about their childhood? You are the one who needs to STFU.
"Pluto was a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time."
What definition? Pluto was call a planet when anything going around the sun was a planet; which was fine/. Now that we have learned a lot more it turns out that was a poor way to determine what a planet is.
Now there are specific requirement as to what a planet is, if it turns out the Pluto meets
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So the experts need to STFU so a non expert like yourself can feel good about their childhood? You are the one who needs to STFU.
"Pluto was a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time."
What definition? Pluto was call a planet when anything going around the sun was a planet; which was fine/. Now that we have learned a lot more it turns out that was a poor way to determine what a planet is.
Now there are specific requirement as to what a planet is, if it turns out the Pluto meets those requirements then t will be a planet.
" and technical use"
except it didn't. It was a useless term.
Kilo equaled a thousand before there where computers. the Computer industry incorrectly co=opted the name, and that was fixed in 1998.
kibibytes only makes an accurate definition.
I'm sorry you are too stupid to understand logical changes, and corrected definitions based on new data.
Really, nothing should change form how you learned it the first time, right?
^^^ This is just how I would react if I was a Pluto denier/terrorist.
Re:Ah, the Planet Pluto (Score:4, Insightful)
If you believe there's some pedantic reason to keep Pluto as a planet, I have to ask whether you hold the same views regarding Ceres.
Ceres was "a planet for both the common and technical definitions for quite some time".
The circumstances surrounding demotion of Ceres and Pluto are rather similar. The timeframe either of the two were considered planets is also similar.
Now, what I find more interesting BOTH for this issue of Eris and Pluto and the argument over Planet classification is to look at MASS instead of diameter:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
Look at this chart of bodies in our Solar System ranked by mass in a logarithmic chart. The eight planets unambiguously rank as the largest bodies. Eris still is more massive than Pluto. And all the dwarf planets are outranked by several moons.
Yes definitions are arbitrary. But the eight planets stand apart. It does make sense to align definitions to match such. In any case, the definitions OUGHT to be consistent. What criteria other than inertia of publications would you prefer that keeps Pluto IN yet leaves Ceres OUT?
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In any case, the definitions OUGHT to be consistent. What criteria other than inertia of publications would you prefer that keeps Pluto IN yet leaves Ceres OUT?
The whole argument is retarded because it can't be extended to other star systems (many which don't have the nice structure of our Solar System). Currently, we have a naming scheme with "planets", "dwarf planets", and "exoplanets", yet only one of these three groups actually are planets. Please continue to lecture us on "consistency".
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Does the IAU even have jurisdiction over other star systems definitions of planets? Since they (the IAU) don't even live in the other systems. I think its up to the (aliens that live there) to name them.
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Does the IAU even have jurisdiction over other star systems definitions of planets?
Yes.
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Who says we are interested in leaving Ceres out? I'm fine with keeping both in and Eris too for that matter.
If the IAU is too lazy to come up with names for the planets just call them 1,2,3,4,5,6,7... SOL-3. That sounds good.
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I'm actually more interested in making Ceres an official planet. Pluto's a big comet. It comes from the Kuiper belt, and doesn't really resemble anything in the inner system. I can certainly understand giving it a different classification. Ceres, on the other hand, is more similar to Mercury than Mercury is to Jupiter, and I don't see any reason at all to classify it separately.
I can see using "cleared its orbit" to separate classes of planets, so Ceres can be a dwarf planet, but "dwarf planet" should be a
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If you believe there's some pedantic reason to keep Pluto as a planet, I have to ask whether you hold the same views regarding Ceres.
This would not be a discussion if Pluto was not the only "planet" to have been discovered by an American.
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Interesting moderation. I guess someone changed the definition of 'troll' while I wasn't looking.
Either that or your gored someone's sacred cow.
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He calls him self an Astrophysicist.
I lie how you need to make shit up, deride a man with excellent credentials, and make fun of planetariums.
You are a fucker, and it's people like you that's killing science in America.
You don't need to discover a planet to be an astronomer, and Tyson had NOTHING TO DO WIT THE DEFINITION OF WHAT A PLANET IS, understand?
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Don't forget, they also redefined the term Astronomer when they started letting Tyson call himself an Astronomer. The man is a shameless self-promoter and a director of a planetarium, not an observatory. A planetarium where they do laser light shows for stoners to Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd music. Unlike some true astronomers who actually discovered a planet, Tyson's planet discovery count is negative one. That's why I prefer to call him a "dwarf astronomer".
Tyson's profiles at the Hayden Planetarium and the Planetary Society (where he is a board member) refer to him as an astrophysicist and astrophysics is a branch of astronomy. If other people refer to him as an astronomer, dwarf or otherwise, that's their mistake but he clearly identifies himself as an astrophysicist.
And yes he does do a lot of media appearances but so did Carl Sagan in his day.
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If other people refer to him as an astronomer, dwarf or otherwise, that's their mistake but he clearly identifies himself as an astrophysicist.
I could refer to myself as the God Emperor of Arrakis, it doesn't make it so. Everyone knows that titles are only properly given by moistened bints tossing scimitars.
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My Very Educated Mother... (Score:2, Funny)
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The problem is to add 6 words [wikipedia.org] to this sentence, as of today's count
It's a trick (Score:3)
Eris is a tricksy one.
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There is no cilantro.
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You have your understanding of Goddess, I have mine.
Yo Momma's so Fat. (Score:2, Funny)
Her title of largest object in her neighbourhood was reclaimed by Pluto.
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Definitions are for losers (Score:2)
The day we demoted Pluto from planethood everything started going downhill fast.
First thing we had the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Then there were as series of volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. And a DEMOCRAT was elected President! And then there is H1N1!!.
The fact is you do not want to denigrate objects named after Gods of the Underworld. Seriously you don't mess with stuff belonging to this guy. What if he curses you with a rain of Plutonium? eh?
It's conservation of size (Score:3)
Mercury is getting smaller and Pluto's getting lllaarrrrger.
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What do you make of this?
Pluto Regains Title (Score:2)
"I float like a butterfly and sting like a bee." -- Pluto
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Woah!! (Score:2)
... aw, still not a planet. :-(
Re:And when Eris' atmosphere is measured... (Score:5, Informative)
From TFA:
Eris is just 2326 kilometers across—possibly smaller than Pluto, whose diameter is somewhere between 2300 and 2400 kilometers. The uncertainty arises because Pluto, unlike Eris, has air that complicates the interpretation of observational data.
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I think they've counted around 5 so far, which is a lot of moons for such a small body such that they suspect these moons are debris from a relatively-recent collision.
This could mean that Pluto has a kind of ring and that the coming probe is doomed if it gets too near. They may decide to steer it further out, skipping close-up observations, unfortunately.
There were similar issues with the Voyager probes near