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Pluto-lessness

  • Aug. 24th, 2006 at 3:01 PM
cottage
Pluto-less

Click image for bigger version.

Inspired by this CNN article. Thanks to [info]antonia_tiger for coming up with the text (with help from Monty Python).

Comments

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[info]victoriae wrote:
Aug. 24th, 2006 07:05 pm (UTC)
Priceless! I need to finally read that article - I mean come on, why remove a planet!?
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[info]twfarlan wrote:
Aug. 24th, 2006 08:02 pm (UTC)
(shrug) In light of continuing scientific discovery, the classification of Pluto as a planet became unsupportable outside of nostalgia. The old reasons don't make sense anymore:

1) They didn't know about the Kuiper Belt objects or about anything travelling farther out than Pluto other than comets. They thought Pluto was unique, and now know it isn't.
2) Once they knew about Charon, they realized it was awfully large to be a moon, and started trying to declare Pluto-Charon a double planet just to keep the classification.
3) Once they knew about the other Trans-Neptunian Objects, they still rationalized Pluto's planetary status based on it being bigger than anything else out there, which stood until they found several objects out there as big or bigger than Pluto.
4) All the other planets have standard orbits. Pluto's eccentric orbit was always a sticking point, and now that we know it isn't even unique in that regard, it just makes no sense to leave it as a planet.

It's astronomy. It's science. Scientific definitions change with continuing discovery and research.
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[info]peteralway wrote:
Aug. 24th, 2006 11:03 pm (UTC)
The dividing line between planet and asteroid is not science. It's arbitrary semantics. A planet is a large body orbiting the sun. Pluto is orbiting the sun. Yes, Pluto and Charon revolve around a common barycenter, but so do the Earth and the Moon. So is Pluto large? How big is big. Pluto's been defined as a planet for 75 years. Sounds like a reasonable cutoff size. So Pluto is a Kuiper Belt Object? Well, Jupiter and Mercury are fundamentally different bodies. Call one a Jovian planet, the other a terrestrial planet. Why not a Kuiper-Belt planet.

There are more Kuiper Belt Objects bigger than Pluto? Then call them planets. Astronomers are allowed to discover new planets. Hell, what's the point of science if they don't discover new things.

If Pluto were found to be smaller than Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, or Juno, then yes, the demotion would be obvious. But this reclassification does not give us new insight into the solar system. It just shortens a list.

I may be nuts, but I find this demotion of Pluto viscerally. As if someone is taking Pluto away from me. Like they have declared its un-discovery. I know it's not rational, but I feel like the astronomical community has walked away from a great century of discovery--Oh, those amazing things our civilization has discovered? Nevermind. They really don't count.
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[info]twfarlan wrote:
Aug. 25th, 2006 01:41 am (UTC)
Sometimes, classifying objects is entirely needful in science. Perhaps it is arbitrary. Many things in life are, and there are still good reasons to have those fine lines set. It hurts nothing to have standard definitions which scientists can use to discuss their fields. As you point out, there has been some emotional investment in keeping Pluto a planet, which is an excellent reason to demote it, frankly. The celestial body named "Pluto" has not been altered. Nothing has changed about it aside from the classification from "planet" to "dwarf planet." It now resides alongside many other celestial bodies of similar scale and type; it's classifical as a binary dwarf planet makes far more sense than keeping it a planet and yet making even more arbitrary and worse, counter-rational exceptions for it.
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[info]technoshaman wrote:
Aug. 24th, 2006 08:18 pm (UTC)
Hee hee hee! I'm so linking here.

(Pointed at the previous article by [info]cflute)
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[info]tigertoy wrote:
Aug. 24th, 2006 11:21 pm (UTC)
Love the cartoon! I assume it would be OK to post a link to it to an email list, but I'm asking just to be sure.

In response to the whole "should we call Pluto a planet" debate, it is pretty clear to me that if we had correctly measured Pluto's size when Tombaugh discovered it, we never would have called it a planet. Early estimates of its size were much bigger than when we got better data. So this is more about fixing a mistake than about demoting anything.
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