Pluto's not a planet - was Pluto Saved! (was going to be "no longer a planet") Merged

Mrs. MacGyver

This is my first time posting in this forum and I was annoyed that scientists want to reclassify Pluto's status.

I read today that scientists are thinking of downsizing Pluto's status to that of a planetoid due to its small stature and the nature of its orbit & atmosphere. It's a pity as its been there since 1930. It all boils down to what the definition of a planet is? How does one define a planet?

"Until recently, the commonest way to include Pluto among the planets has been to insist that size matters. The argument goes like this: even though it's smaller than Earth's Moon (or, for that matter, the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and Triton), Pluto orbits the Sun. And because it's the largest object to do so--other than Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune--it belongs to the planetary pantheon".


See the following links:

ww.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,208242,00.html

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/259767.stm

www.cnn.com/TECH/space/9901/20/puny.pluto/


Sorry that the first two links do not appear as a hyperlink on this page.

Karoma

Aye. Old news though. Pluto has been contested ever since it was added. If it is to be classed a planet, then more should be too and it gets messy. "Planemo" has been suggested as an in-between naming measure... *shrug*

Mrs. MacGyver

I think they should leave it though (i'm new to this whole interest in astonomy thing!) i mean it orbits the earth (although it year is quite long as is its orbit), has an atmosphere. People have a fond attachment towards it.

galactus

On the one hand, Pluto is clearly not a planet but a KBO (Kuiper Belt Object).

"The largest recent discovery is 2003 UB313, nicknamed Xena."
Hmm, mind you it would be cool having planets with names like that.

There is no decision on this yet according to the Official web site of the XXVIth International Astronomical Union...nor in their newsletter, which is well worth a read.

There's a lot of stuff out there! (Discovery Hints at a Quadrillion Space Rocks Beyond Neptune) so its possible that Pluto will get the boot but, politically it seems unlikely (Pluto is the only planet discovered by an American).

mike65

BBC2 had an enjoyble programme a while back about one mans campaign to downgrade Pluto and the reactions to it.

Mike.

mike65

Important news!

The International Astronomy Union are proposing to expand the solar system,

from Guardian

Astronomers want to redefine our home in the Milky Way as a place with 12 - rather than nine - planets orbiting the sun.

The proposal comes from a two-year project by the International Astronomy Union (IAU) to create the first ever scientific definition for the term planet.

It will also mean that Pluto keeps its status as a planet, despite calls from many astronomers, revealed in the Guardian on Monday, that it should be demoted because of its diminutive size.

If the ideas are approved at the general meeting of the IAU in Prague next week, schoolchildren will, in future, have to learn that the solar system has 12 planets: eight classical ones that dominate the system - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus - and four in a new category called plutons.

These are Pluto, its moon Charon, a spherical asteroid that sits between Mars and Jupiter called Ceres, and an object called 2003 UB313 but nicknamed Xena by American astronomers who found it.

Mike.

Flukey

The astrologers are going to have fun trying to work with all this.

radiospan

I think The Guardian is wrong there. There are 3 proposed "plutons", not 4. Ceres (between Mars and Jupiter) isn't one of them, although it is proposed to become a planet.

The vote is on August 24th.

More links:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4798205.stm (BBC Q&A)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1_Ceres

Mrs. MacGyver

Mike,

I read today that they are proposing to add 3 new planets (planetoids) such as ceres to the list. surely it dosent deserve to be a planet, as its a glorified asteroid!

Giblet

You could say that about a lot of planets.

Thirdfox

The solar system has just 8 planets - as voted for by astronomers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5282440.stm

BBC wrote:

Pluto loses status as a planet
Artist's impression of Pluto, BBC
Pluto's status has been contested for many years
Astronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

I for one feel sadness that the lovely little piece of rock will be erased from our schoolbooks etc. as a planet.

What do you guys think?

Thirdfox

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5282440.stm

BBC wrote:

Pluto loses status as a planet
Artist's impression of Pluto, BBC
Pluto's status has been contested for many years
Astronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet.

therecklessone

What's Mickey Mouse going to do???

Ruu_Old

Moved from AH, I still reckon it should be considered, always has been and no need to change it now imo.

edit: probably could merge this with the other pluto thread mods.

radiospan

Thirdfox wrote:

The solar system has just 8 planets - as voted for by astronomers.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/5282440.stm



I for one feel sadness that the lovely little piece of rock will be erased from our schoolbooks etc. as a planet.

What do you guys think?

Well it'll still be taught in schools, just as one of the dwarf planets I suppose.

I was surprised to see that this is the best resolution picture of it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Pluto.jpg

galactus

Excellent news. Goodbye Pluto, you wannabe.

The official newsletter has many comments on this from the astronomers. "Pluto, Ceres and other large Trans-Neptunian objects in quasi-hydrostatic equilibrium should be not considered as planets, since they never were the dominant bodies in their accretion zones." Umm, can anyone translate this please!

Next question: does this mean Pluto Express is going to turn around and head back to Earth?

Slightly sad, but I think the end result should be a good one - I remember when reading about the solar system in the Junior Cert that not much emphasis was placed on Pluto, as well as the addional objects orbiting the sun.

[edit] Plus I think the title of this thread might want to be changed

Flukey

It will take a bit of getting used to and lots of people will continue to consider the solar system as 9 planets.

The Bollox

Flukey wrote:

It will take a bit of getting used to and lots of people will continue to consider the solar system as 9 planets.

that's the kind of ths everyone said about the euro, saying we will still call it pounds, all it took was a week or two

:|

Mrs. MacGyver wrote:

. It's a pity as its been there since 1930.

i think its been there a bit longer....

Thirdfox

There in the textbooks as a planet I suppose is what she meant...

The planetoid has been there for around 5 billion years right?

Kevster

The facts are that Pluto is an asteroid / KBO and that it didn't form in the way that the other planets formed. It's orbit is much different than the other planets and, indeed, at times it crosses Neptune's orbit so as to be closer to the Sun than Neptune is.


Whether people want to continue masking Pluto's true nature is up to them - I don't particularly mind. I'll still know in my own head the origin of our 'Ninth Planet'.

Aard

Flukey wrote:

It will take a bit of getting used to and lots of people will continue to consider the solar system as 9 planets.

I'm guessing people said the same about the Classical Planets when Pluto arrived on the scene.

Kwekubo

No need to be unduly upset about it, they haven't voted to have Pluto blown up or anything! The only different will be that Ceres, Xena, Sedna etc will be added to the schoolbooks.

Flukey

There has always been a lot of debate about Pluto and what it is and what accounts for its strange orbit. Maybe it is a KBO or maybe it was a moon of Neptune. There is a lot of questions about our solar system that have intrigued astronomers for years. Why Venus and Uranus rotate in the opposite direction to all the other planets; why Uranus rotates almost on its side; the 17° tilt in the orbit of Pluto and the way it in comes inside Neptune at times. Is there some connection between those things? Did some cataclysmic event(s) occur to knock Uranus on its side and to send Pluto, possibly a moon, away from Neptune into its own unusual orbit. There are theories on all of these and other questions. The truth is we don't know. That is part of the fascination of astronomy and other science subjects. Striving for additional knowledge and coming up with and testing theories; fully accepted theories being thrown out in favour of new ones.

Bob the Builder

http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060824/NEWS99/60824008/1009/NEWS07

itsAboy

Mrs. MacGyver wrote:

I think they should leave it though (i'm new to this whole interest in astonomy thing!) i mean it orbits the earth (although it year is quite long as is its orbit), has an atmosphere. People have a fond attachment towards it.

Minor planets called after rock stars include: Springsteen, Elvis, Enya, Beegees, Oldfield, Jimmypage, Lennon, Rolling Stones, Buddy, Santana.

lostexpectation

a long time coming ,so it not a planet anymore but a dwarf planet.... so it still is a planet... *doh*.... they should have named it a KBO... :mad:


i think childrens science books have a lot to answer for, not displaying the distance between the planets properly, displaying them all as if there on the same plane, saying the atom is smallest thing, and there only 3 states of matter :mad:

doonothing

My Very Easy Method Just Sums Up Nine - *cough*

Capt'n Midnight

galactus wrote:

"Pluto, Ceres and other large Trans-Neptunian objects in quasi-hydrostatic equilibrium should be not considered as planets, since they never were the dominant bodies in their accretion zones." Umm, can anyone translate this please!

weasel words

Pluto's orbit was inside Uranus not so long ago so of course it wasn't dominant in that accretion zone.

Jupiter is the dominant body in the accretion zone of the outer solar system. It protects us from comets. So the Earth isn't a planet then ?

edit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood#_note-1

Controversy

Dr. Alan Stern, of the NASA New Horizons mission to Pluto, points out that Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have also not completely cleared their orbital neighbourhoods, which would technically make them qualify as dwarf planets. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids, and Jupiter has 100,000 Trojan asteroids in its orbital path. "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there," he has said.[4]

Capt'n Midnight

Mrs. MacGyver wrote:

I read today that scientists are thinking of downsizing Pluto's status to that of a planetoid due to its small stature and the nature of its orbit & atmosphere. It's a pity as its been there since 1930. It all boils down to what the definition of a planet is? How does one define a planet?

"Until recently, the commonest way to include Pluto among the planets has been to insist that size matters. The argument goes like this: even though it's smaller than Earth's Moon (or, for that matter, the moons Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, and Triton), Pluto orbits the Sun.

If it's bodies that orbit the sun the Charon does too. The argument is that Pluto and Charon orbit a point out side either planet.
And as for atmsophere Mercury has none worth talking about compared to most of the moons listed above.

Oh and it's not downsizing - like the corporate gimps say it's rightsizing

TBH
maybe we need new definitions, Gas Giants is very good,
Terrestial planets is also good.
Not sure how much I like Dwarf Planets
Maybe "Moons" leaving "moonlets" for the smaller ones.
Why can't we call Mercury a moon of the sun ??

lostexpectation

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

If it's bodies that orbit the sun the Charon does too. The argument is that Pluto and Charon orbit a point out side either planet.
And as for atmsophere Mercury has none worth talking about compared to most of the moons listed above.

Oh and it's not downsizing - like the corporate gimps say it's rightsizing

TBH
maybe we need new definitions, Gas Giants is very good,
Terrestial planets is also good.
Not sure how much I like Dwarf Planets
Maybe "Moons" leaving "moonlets" for the smaller ones.
Why can't we call Mercury a moon of the sun ??

what about a planetoid I would have accepted that over dwarf planet

mike65

Vertically Challanged, Short Stature?

Mike.

Black NG-60-90

Maybe its a reality game show where they vote off a different planet every decade. What ever happened to Planet X?

mike65

The Tenth Planet either does'nt exist or could be the generic name for any number of Kuiper Belt Objects.

Back in the day (late 19th/early 20th century) it was supposed to be an undiscovered gas giant but quite how a gas planet could be missed is beyond me with modern astonomy techniques and technology.

Some belive its out there and will appear and come close to the earth and turn our magetic field upside down! But these people are Battlefield Earth fans.

Mike.

Black NG-60-90

I was looking up some info on 'Xena'. Its actually larger than pluto and has it's own moon. Why was this never classified as the 10th planet?

galactus

Capt'n Midnight wrote:

weasel words

Pluto's orbit was inside Uranus not so long ago so of course it wasn't dominant in that accretion zone.

Jupiter is the dominant body in the accretion zone of the outer solar system. It protects us from comets. So the Earth isn't a planet then ?

edit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood#_note-1

The point here is that the accretion zone is only of consequence when the nascent planetesimal begins to form.

As for Jupiter being the dominant accretion zone in the outer solar system - if only it were that simple.


PS Correction - Until 1999 Pluto was within Neptune's orbit not that of Uranus.

Flukey

Lostexpectation wrote:

i think childrens science books have a lot to answer for, not displaying the distance between the planets properly, displaying them all as if there on the same plane,

If they were to do it to scale, let's just say that those books would need considerably larger pages. The page, if it were to hold the entire Solar System to scale, would be considerably larger than the schoolyard and indeed many a university campus. Remember too that Pluto does not mark the edge of the solar system, as many of those diagrams imply, but its distance from the Sun is only a miniscule fraction of the distance to the edge of our Solar System. So in the interests of the rainforests and the ability for children to be able to carry their books to school, I think we have to go along with the type of diagrams that they do have in those books.

Thirdfox

Or they could make the diagrams tiny and children need to buy microscopes to read them... electron microscopes mwah ha ha ha!

galactus

Flukey wrote:

If they were to do it to scale, let's just say that those books would need considerably larger pages. The page, if it were to hold the entire Solar System to scale, would be considerably larger than the schoolyard and indeed many a university campus. Remember too that Pluto does not mark the edge of the solar system, as many of those diagrams imply, but its distance from the Sun is only a miniscule fraction of the distance to the edge of our Solar System. So in the interests of the rainforests and the ability for children to be able to carry their books to school, I think we have to go along with the type of diagrams that they do have in those books.

Lostexpectaton is also refering to the fact that Pluto/Charon is inclined at 17 degrees to the plane of the ecliptic - which raises the question why?

Kids are like sponges - why not add in KBOs, Oort cloud etc.

Lostexpectaton wrote:

saying the atom is smallest thing

This used to drive me bananas! Why the big secret about anti-matter? What is worse is perpetuating the 19th century idea that atoms are minature solar systems.

Although in fairness to the writers of kids science book, where do you draw the line? Adding things like "most of the universe is thought to be composed of dark matter and scientists aren't in agreement as to what its made of" might cause undue angst.

Flukey

Well Galactus, I mentioned some of those things myself in another post I put up:

Flukey wrote:

There has always been a lot of debate about Pluto and what it is and what accounts for its strange orbit. Maybe it is a KBO or maybe it was a moon of Neptune. There is a lot of questions about our solar system that have intrigued astronomers for years. Why Venus and Uranus rotate in the opposite direction to all the other planets; why Uranus rotates almost on its side; the 17° tilt in the orbit of Pluto and the way it in comes inside Neptune at times. Is there some connection between those things? Did some cataclysmic event(s) occur to knock Uranus on its side and to send Pluto, possibly a moon, away from Neptune into its own unusual orbit. There are theories on all of these and other questions. The truth is we don't know. That is part of the fascination of astronomy and other science subjects. Striving for additional knowledge and coming up with and testing theories; fully accepted theories being thrown out in favour of new ones.

galactus

The final nail in the coffin: Pluto now just a number

I didn't know that in May Hubble had discovered that Pluto, I mean asteroid number 134340, had another couple of buddies apart from Charon: Nix and Hydra.

Flukey wrote:

Well Galactus, I mentioned some of those things myself in another post I put up:

Apologies Flukey!