this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
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There are 9 planets…
There are at least 9
Pluto is a dwarf planet. Planet. You wouldn’t say that a dwarf person isn’t a person.
Speak for yourself
You wouldn't call a person a dwarf, period. So don't do that. If you ever meet a little person, they'll probably refer to themselves as a little person. You should just follow their lead
A dwarf planet is not a category of planets. It is a category of sub-planetary objects. This is how the term "dwarf planet" was adopted by the IAU in 2006. It did used to mean "type of planet", but there are just too many of them, and they're really too different from planets, so it literally does not mean that anymore. At least to astronomers.
Whatever a red car is still a car.
It’s dumb to say it isn’t a planet just because it hasn’t yet cleared its orbit. The decision to make it “not a planet” was also made by astronomers, not by planetary scientists. Like people with “Star” in their name know more about planets than people with “planet” in theirs.
Anyways it’s extra silly because if you have “real planets” and “dwarf planets” then what is the higher group containing those two? “Things that orbit the sun”? No, they should both be planets.
I'm not going to argue with astronomers about how they define planets. I do my job, they do theirs!
At least 9... https://www.britannica.com/list/our-5-dwarf-planets
What about Uranus
Edit: or is that a moon 🤣 I crack myself up!
I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.
Oh...what's it called now?
Urectum.
Lmao I love Futurama
I'm torn on this one, cause recently they've been finding evidence of a 'new' 9th planet, way beyond Pluto's orbit. So I'm on the fence of "there are 8 planets" and "there are 9 planets." 🤔
I'm of the believe that we made up the word planet and it can mean whatever we say it means.
The issue is, as I understand it, we either have 8 planets (or 9, if there is an exoplanet), or a whole bunch of planets, depending on how narrowly we define them.
Yeah this is the correct take. Either Pluto (and by extension, any object of similar size) is a planet, which would mean there's thousands of Pluto-sized planets in the solar system; or pluto is 'too small' to be a planet. Which is the answer they (Sci community) settled on, because if every comet/asteroid is within the threshold definition of 'planet' then there would be no point in distinguishing planets at all.
Kinda like how we have dwarf-stars and supermassive stars 1000x bigger than our sun. If they were all the same size there would be no point defining them beyond 'star'.
Pluto being too small isn't actually the grounds on which it got demoted. The size requirement is just being massive enough to reach hydrostatic equilibrium - that is, be heavy enough that it's round. Pluto does meet this one
The one it fails is clearing its orbit. This basically means being much heavier than everything else in the same orbit. Be gravitationally in charge of your orbit. The other eight are all hundreds if not thousands of times heavier than everything else in their orbit (not including moons, since they're gravitationally bound to the planet anyway), whereas Pluto is less than a tenth of the total mass in its own orbit. Ceres is actually more gravitationally dominant over its orbit than that, although still nowhere near the eight planets.
This one sounds a bit weird at first, but I kinda like how it has such a massive delineation between the things we instinctively think of as planets and everything else.
It's also the fact that Pluto doesn't have its own orbital slot. It is clearly something that escaped Uranus at some point, that's why their orbits intersect. A planet doesn't just have to have a certain size, it also has to have its own distinct orbital path.
I'm of the opinion we made up all the words, but those mouth sounds must have a strict meaning whenever possible. Words are important, they're how you communicate concepts. Everyone should be precise with their words to the best of their understanding, if you have to redefine the word planet in every conversation the concept is diluted and you waste a lot of time
In this case, if Pluto is a planet, we have at least 13. We might discover another 10 or 20 if there's no planet 9 hiding behind the kyper belt and it's all dwarf planets... Ain't no one got time to remember 30+ planets
30+ planets should be pretty easy. They name them after mythology. The 50 states aren't difficult to remember, and those don't have any sort of naming convention.
That's pretty much how it is. In ancient times, planets would have been objects that were distinguishable from stars in ways they had the ability to differentiate from. For example, with a telescope, any object that doesn't shine like a star, that moves across the sky at a different rate than the stars, or maybe has visible rings.
Then once science found things that past science couldn't account for, they redefined what a planet was, according to its size/gravitational pull or other factors, and which Pluto didn't fit. Apparently due to Pluto's small size, it's not even a dwarf-planet, and by that measure is basically just a really big asteroid (we even know of asteroids that are bigger than Pluto).
Recently? I've been hearing about a possible large trans-Pluto object since before Pluto lost its status as a planet.
I must not be on the more scientific news places then, I didn't start hearing about it until around last year--maybe the year before--, well after pluto got thrown out like last night's trash.
There's been "planet X" theories since the 50s
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_hypothetical_Solar_System_objects&diffonly=true#Planets
Happy cake day!