King Tutankhamun Posted August 25, 2006 Report Share Posted August 25, 2006 You might have heard that Pluto is no longer considered an official planet, it's now called a dwarf planet along with UB313. So there are now only 8 official planets in our solar system!Article Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Yamato Take Posted August 26, 2006 Report Share Posted August 26, 2006 That makes me sad. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shogun 144 Posted August 26, 2006 Report Share Posted August 26, 2006 Personally I think the whole thing is a bogus descison if you ask me. Pluto is still a planet no matter what the IAU chooses the call it. If you ask me I think they are over complicating Space. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
King Tutankhamun Posted August 26, 2006 Author Report Share Posted August 26, 2006 Look at all the stuff at Cafeexpress already for Pluto: http://www.cafepress.com/buy/pluto/-/cfpt2...archBox/x_0/y_0Me too. They should have just left it the way it was. If they said it was a planet 76 years ago, then it's a planet today! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ykkrosh Posted August 26, 2006 Report Share Posted August 26, 2006 I think they are over complicating SpaceIt seems to me that they're trying to simplify space, particularly solar systems outside our own - it's hard to talk about discovering new planets if there's no agreement over whether a certain rock is a planet or not. You can't define 'planet' by making a list of them - that worked for the nine we had here, but it won't scale up nicely in the future when we know about too many to count. And any definition has to be straightforward and consistent and not have special exceptions, if it's going to classify future lumps of rock reliably. And most consistent definitions would put Pluto in the same category as hundreds of other rocks that are floating around the sun, and are the same size and have similarly weird orbits. We don't want to make up mnemonics to learn the names of hundreds of planets, so that category is instead considered to be separate from the major planets, and Pluto falls in with that. Seems logical to me If they said it was a planet 76 years ago, then it's a planet today!They said Uranus was a star for hundreds of years, and a comet for a month - but as they learned more about it and about the rest of space, they were willing to update their knowledge and start calling it something that more accurately describes what it is. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mythos_Ruler Posted August 27, 2006 Report Share Posted August 27, 2006 (edited) I much prefered the other proposal and am sorely disappointed that they went with this one. I preferred making Pluto and Charon double plutons (since they are sattelites of each other), and Ceres and Xena full fledged planets (since they are large enough to be round and orbit nothing but Sol). Edited August 27, 2006 by Mythos_Ruler Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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