There’s still hope for Pluto the planet
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced an attempted redefinition of the word “planet” that excluded many objects, including Pluto. We think that decision was flawed, and that a logical and useful definition of planet will include many more worlds…
Most essentially, planetary worlds (including planetary moons) are those large enough to have pulled themselves into a ball by the strength of their own gravity. Below a certain size, the strength of ice and rock is enough to resist rounding by gravity, and so the smallest worlds are lumpy…
At the 2006 IAU conference, which was held in Prague, the few scientists remaining at the very end of the week-long meeting (less than 4 percent of the world’s astronomers and even a smaller percentage of the world’s planetary scientists) ratified a hastily drawn definition that contains obvious flaws. For one thing, it defines a planet as an object orbiting around our sun ”” thereby disqualifying the planets around other stars, ignoring the exoplanet revolution, and decreeing that essentially all the planets in the universe are not, in fact, planets.
Even within our solar system, the IAU scientists defined “planet” in a strange way, declaring that if an orbiting world has “cleared its zone,” or thrown its weight around enough to eject all other nearby objects, it is a planet. Otherwise it is not. This criterion is imprecise and leaves many borderline cases, but what’s worse is that they chose a definition that discounts the actual physical properties of a potential planet, electing instead to define “planet” in terms of the other objects that are ”” or are not ”” orbiting nearby. This leads to many bizarre and absurd conclusions.
So, they drummed Pluto out of the planet roll call by waiting till there weren’t many scientists left at the meeting before they took the vote? Sounds like politics to me. Give us back our Pluto, the ninth planet!
I would think the definition of a planet would be short and simple, but, then again, I’m not a scientist, what do I know.
“Sounds like politics to me.”, to me too.
I’m reminded of this: If you are to mix ice cream with dog poop the resulting mixture will taste more like the latter than the former. Likewise science and politics.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eH1iWygFL3g
So, they drummed Pluto out of the planet roll call by waiting till there weren’t many scientists left at the meeting before they took the vote?
It worked for the Federal Reserve Act that was operated and controlled by private interests that are unelected.
Pluto was dropped not for any real scientific reason, but that the people doing so just wanted attention.
This is what NASA tells us Pluto looks like.
https://www.bing.com/images/search?view=detailV2&ccid=1%2B2d9mCY&id=6FC34A6E69F091C6B50A4C5C2BFBADB1A46606BA&thid=OIP.1-2d9mCYRnD7V9DmRLdVzAHaDt&mediaurl=https%3A%2F%2Flifebeyondexaggeration.files.wordpress.com%2F2015%2F07%2Fpluto-on-pluto.jpg&exph=480&expw=960&q=Pluto+picture+as+Pluto&simid=607991423772065883&ajaxhist=0
That Pluto is a planet is obvious. Given its orbit, whether its a “natural born” planet or a rogue planet, i.e. an “interstellar planet” is the real question.
The near universal term now used is “dwarf planet.”
BTW, Ceres is now deemed a dwarf planet. It’s fully rounded, too.
Pluto is also a couplet.
Its companion moon is tidally locked… just like our Moon.
It’s MUCH closer to Pluto than the Moon is to Earth, and the mass ratios cause both to spin around a center point that is OUTSIDE the surface of Pluto. This is unique.
Even so, it has other, ultra-dinky, moons.
“The dwarf planet Pluto has five moons down to a detection limit of about 1 km in diameter. In order of distance from Pluto, they are Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra.[1]
Charon, the largest of the five moons, is mutually tidally locked with Pluto, and is massive enough that Pluto—Charon is sometimes considered a double dwarf planet.”
The Wikipedia entries on “Pluto” and the “Kuiper Belt” are quite good. Pluto properly belongs to the Kuiper belt, and another beyond Neptune body called Eris is actually bigger than Pluto but belongs to the “scattered disk.” The Kuiper belt, the scattered disk, the Hills cloud, and the Oort cloud are all distinct outer solar system groups.
With the exception of Mercury, the rest of the planets have very circular orbits, but Pluto does not. Neptune’s eccentricity is 0.0095 but Pluto’s is 0.249. Also Pluto’s orbit is on a significantly different plane compared to the rest of the planets.
Part of the early conviction that Pluto was a planet came from the belief that it was Planet X. Early celestial mechanics calculations indicated that the orbits of Uranus and Neptune weren’t correct unless there was another undiscovered planet, Planet X. In the final wash, Planet X was just a case of bad data in, and bad conclusions out.
Reading this is like reading Game of Thrones as historical text. Cosmology has an error rate between the mathematical models and astronomical observations as large as 120 zeroes.
For example, consider the status quo solar system model of circular and elliptical orbits. So how does Venus and Mercury show up as lights in the morning in daytime?
The inclination of deflection and light reflection would have to be so sharp, that for Mercury it wouldn’t exist as a full body.