About 40 new planets discovered around our Sun!

[Frank]

New definition of planet:

"A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet."

That gives us 12 planets at first count, with an option on about 40 more.

 

[epicstruggle]

I have no problem with the definition. I hope scientists are spending more time actually looking for planets (habitable or otherwise) than deciding on what a planet is.

epic

 

[Skrying]

Oh boy.

I wonder how this will go across in early childhood science classes. "Today class we'll look at the 40 different planets in our solar system!"

Hehe, 12? Easy as pie! 40? Not so much.

 

[Guden Oden]

Where are these 'planets' supposed to be located? Besides, which are these other three planets some of the other posts in this thread mention? Last I checked, there were only nine (established) planets so far.

 

[obobski]

it, i'm guessing, follows the theory/speculation of Pluto actually being a GIANT fscking asteroid strayed from the Kupier belt and being a double planet with it's moon, due to their similar size (c/p earth and it's moon, notice how many times larger earth is, Pluto is only like 20% larger iirc)

So based on that train of thought, other GIANT fscking-class asteroids can classify themselves as planets, and the other asteroid belt that i forget wth it's called but it probably has some


either that, or due to political tensions, we've set a series of charges on the planet earth and in a few weeks it's getting blown into 40 segments to prevent WW3 from happening
(yes, that's right, destroy the earth to prevent the earth from being destroyed)

i still vote YES for Sagan's theory of turning Venus into a much much bigger version of the Carribean through hitting it with big things...what isn't there to love:

A) giant explosions
B) giant spaceships
C) giant crap colliding with other giant crap
D) massive tropical paradise planet
E) nearly unlimited water
F) did I mention the giant spaceships?

 

[Tahir2]

fascking heck!

Is "fascking" a new swear word?

As in: What fascking planet dammit!

 

[obobski]

where is fascking appearing?
nvm found it

 

[arjan de lumens]

Where are these 'planets' supposed to be located? Besides, which are these other three planets some of the other posts in this thread mention? Last I checked, there were only nine (established) planets so far.

The three proposed for immediate inclusion are:

• Ceres (~1000km diameter rock ball between Mars and Jupiter; has had - and lost - planet status before)
• Charon (traditionally considered to be a moon of Pluto, but is large enough that people want to categorize the Pluto+Charon system as a double planet rather than a planet-with-a-moon)
• 2003 UB313 ("Xena"; somewhat larger than Pluto, but with an orbit farther out)

The other ~40 or so objects generally fall into two categories:

• Other objects outside Neptune's orbit that are large enough to be near-spherical under their own gravity. The number of known objects in this category is large and rapidly growing.
• Asteroid-belt objects that are not readily and obviously dismissable as non-spheroid: Vesta, Hygiea, Pallas in particular.

 

[Zaphod]

Malappropos: Colbert Trash Talks The New Planets.

 

[Guden Oden]

Hm, this is all very interesting, but what I wanna know is, WHAT WILL ALL THIS TALK ABOUT OTHER PLANETS DO TO MY HOROSCOPE, HUH?!!!





...No, I'm of course not serious. Well, other than mildly ironic perhaps, seeing as astrology is a fraudulent pseudo-science, and it would be nice to see those crazy people hooked on it get their panties all in a bunch over it.

 

[Humus]

Hm, this is all very interesting, but what I wanna know is, WHAT WILL ALL THIS TALK ABOUT OTHER PLANETS DO TO MY HOROSCOPE, HUH?!!!

Ah, that explains why the horoscopes never got it right, they didn't take Ceres, Charon and 2003 UB313 (and ~40 other objects) into account.

 

[nutball]

This is a stupid decision. It's purely to avoid the bad press of relegating Pluto to the status of a non-planet.

 

[Skrying]

This is a stupid decision. It's purely to avoid the bad press of relegating Pluto to the status of a non-planet.

I doubt that. How many people honestly care if Pluto is a planet it or not? If your job involves the planets, maybe you'd care. Other than that the 3rd graders who care would celebrate because they'd have one less planet to memorize.

I think it'd make much bigger press with adding planets than subtracting one.

 

[nutball]

I doubt that. How many people honestly care if Pluto is a planet it or not? If your job involves the planets, maybe you'd care. Other than that the 3rd graders who care would celebrate because they'd have one less planet to memorize.

*shrugs* Well that's just the feeling I get from talking to my colleagues. Anyway you don't have to believe me, hear what Mike Brown (who discovered 2003 UB313) has to say on the issue (sorry it's RealAudio, blame the BBC not me!).

From a scientific standpoint it simply transforms an arbitrary definition into a woolly definition.

 

[hoom]

it simply transforms an arbitrary definition into a woolly definition.

Excellent

Personally I'm particularly glad to see Ceres finally make it back to the status of Planet, it was actually the first asteroid discovered but was on the books as a planet for quite some time

Now we need a new term + woolly definition that seperates moons that are big enough to be spherical from those that aren't too, because its silly having mere moons that are bigger than planets.
Moonlets? Moonets? minor Moons? Moonies?

 

[Frank]

Excellent

Personally I'm particularly glad to see Ceres finally make it back to the status of Planet, it was actually the first asteroid discovered but was on the books as a planet for quite some time

Now we need a new term + woolly definition that seperates moons that are big enough to be spherical from those that aren't too, because its silly having mere moons that are bigger than planets.
Moonlets? Moonets? minor Moons? Moonies?

They cannot do that, because it would definitely make our moon into a planet. We would live on one part of a dual-planet pair, which would be much less acceptable to the general public than removing Pluto from the list.

Politics, not science has been at work here.

 

[Frank]

Btw, I still think Chalnot and me came up with a much better definition in the last topic we had about this.

 

[hoom]

link/precis?

 

[Frank]

link/precis?

http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/showthread.php?p=780439#post780439

Instead of looking at the size first and foremost, we would look at their behaviour. If they have the same orbital characteristics as the other planets, they might fit. Although we would still need a scale for size, from planet through planetoid to asteroid/comet.

And planets can be further divided into gas giants, icy, and rocky planets.


Edit: we would extrapolate from the accretion of the initial disk at star formation, and say that everything in that disk that cumulates into a large body would be a planet, while everything that just gathered enough mass by gravity and ended up in some random orbit wouldn't be a planet.

This would lead to another decent definition: a planet and its moons comprise the only objects in an orbit in that planet's original orbital configuration. This would eliminate, for example, Pluto, because we believe it to be a Kuiper belt object that was deviated from its initial orbit. All of the 8 planets would satisfy this criterion, because they are all large enough to have scooped up everything in their original orbital path. Asteroids in the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt and Oort cloud objects would not satisfy these criteria because they share their orbits with a great number of other objects with very similar orbits.

 

[nutball]

The problems with that definition, as I outlined in that thread, are a) that current models of the formation of planetary systems tend to suggest that it's a highly dynamic process, b) your definition incorporates some sort of divining of history.

Models suggest that proto-planets migrate all over the place due to tidal interactions with the proto-planetary disc. So if nothing else you need to be careful to tightly define what you mean by "initial". You also need to be specific how you're going to divine the evolution (or non-evolution) of the orbital configuration over time from observations confined a very small range of epochs.