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Don’t take Mercury for granted.
This is how we lost Pluto to the “well ackchually” gang.
I love how i get knowledgeable stuff under such memes
Best part of lemmy
Well … what planet does Mercury orbit? Oh … yea, then its not a moon.
*yeah. Not yea or nay. It isn’t a vote.
From google: “yea is the word we sometimes use for yes, yay is the word we use to express joy, approval, or excitement.” From Grammarly: “you can use yea or yeah for yes”
If your going to be a weird-ass internet grammar nazi then at least be right about the grammar, otherwise you look like a total and complete idiot. That’s my vote.
Every voice vote I’ve ever had the honor of participating in, Aye is the word we used. As in “All in favor say Aye. All against say Nay”
Yea, I can’t say that “yea” or “yeah” is a hill worth dying on these days. So yeah…That’s how I see it. (Anybody see my Oxford comma? I had it here somewhere)
I don’t like the format generally, so I never thought I’d appreciate a kawaii-anime-style narration with interesting facts about planets, yet here we are. Where’d you get them from? Or are you drawing them yourself?
😳 don’t like the format?! Nani?
THIS is the pluto chan I know:
WHEN I FLEX I FEEL MY BEST
Meanwhile Jupiter-san gets all the titles and meteor hugs
I mean jupiter-chan is humongous:
poor Flat(-chested) Earth…
Wait, YOU’RE the artist? This is incredible
Gas giants aren’t planets: they’re just clouds, man.
More like a failure as a sun. We should all point and laugh at Jupiter.
The sun is just a particularly angry cloud.
Failed stars
Space clouds.
People fighting for Pluto that it should be a planet instead of a dwarf planet
Ceres: 🥺
Context: Ceres is now considered a dwarf planet, and used to be considered just an asteroid, but when it was first discovered it was considered a planet. That was in 1801. There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t. Like a lot of things in nature, things just exist, and as humans we categorize them. Ceres is round like a planet like Pluto. I’m not saying it should be considered a planet, I think dwarf planet fits them both nicely. As late as the 1950s Ceres was still sometimes considered a planet by some people.
I have a sort spot for it. I love it.
Edit: Because two people have misunderstood me now I’m going to say it more explicitly. I’m fully aware there is a scientific definition for dwarf planets. I’m not saying there isn’t. I’m just saying compared to something else like prime numbers there isn’t an obviously correct way to categorize them and the definition has changed over time. By stating the current definition of planets and/or dwarf planets you’re missing my point. Those definitions change. See here for the history.
I found it interesting that Warframe, set in the Solar System (+ SciFi/Fantasy stuff) features not only the various planets (including Pluto), but also moons (Deimos, Phobos, Europa) and dwarf planets (Ceres, Eris, Sedna) and even an asteroid (though the original name isn’t known, if it ever had one). Not relevant to the topic, just came to mind.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t
There are - exactly three.
- is in orbit around a star,
- has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and
- has “cleared the neighbourhood” around its orbit.
The last one means that its gravitational pull has removed any smaller objects that might be in its orbit, either by kicking them out of it, or by catching them as moons.
Pluto’s orbit is full of debris.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t. Like a lot of things in nature, things just exist, and as humans we categorize them.
You’re the second person to ignore the sentence immediately following that.
Because that sentence doesn’t really make sense. “Criteria” is a human concept. Nature doesn’t do “criteria”, nor “objective” for that matter. So, yes, there’s no “natural criteria” for when something is X or Y, we, humans, make those criteria. Doesn’t matter if it’s in relation to animals, plants, or planets.
So you’re saying things just exist, and as humans we categorize them? Because that’s what I said.
The idea of a “category” is inherently human. Just like “objective” and “criteria”.
Which means there is objective criteria for what is categorised as a planet - it’s whatever we, humans, define them to be.
The scientific community was basically backed into a corner: either create a new category for Pluto and similar bodies, or we go from 9 planets to over 3,000 (iirc), lol.
The only sensible choice was made, imo.
I’m fighting for jupiter to also be a dwarf planet because it has not cleared its orbit of a few million asteroids.
All those asteroids are cqptured in Jupiter’s Trojan points, no?
*Lagrange points
You do have a point
it blew my tiny mind when i found out that there are multiple dwarf planets in long solar orbits in our system
they might be small and enjoy solitude but why are we forgetting about them???
and now apparently there’s also a dwarf planet in the inner solar system that nobody talks about??? rude
there’s also a dwarf planet in the inner solar system
It’s arguable about whether it’s in the “Inner Solar System”. Ceres is inside the asteroid belt, and the asteroid belt is the separator between the inner and outer system. It’s like floating in the middle of The Rhine and debating whether you’re in Germany or France
Exactly! It’s right there past Mars! It’s not like it’s some weird thing off in the cold dark past Pluto.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t.
There is, though, or rather there should be another one.
The official definition says
But I also said,
Like a lot of things in nature, things just exist, and as humans we categorize them.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t.
There is, though, or rather there should be another one.
The official definition says it’s a planet if it’s big enough to be round, which IMHO is a bullshit definition because nobody cares whether your object’s round, as in, for practical settlement purposes.
What’s important though is that it’s large enough to hold an atmosphere (at least if it had one). That’s only the case if the gravitational field is strong enough, which is the case roughly for objects of mass starting at around 10^23 kg. That definition fits surprisingly well the current actual classification of what is a planet and what isn’t, though.
Edit: I want to elaborate a bit more on this. Basically, if you consider a planet that has an atmosphere, like Earth, you see that the atmospheric density/pressure decreases exponentially with height. The concept of Scale Height discusses this: The atmosphere decreases exponentially, but if you take the total mass of the atmosphere and divide it by the density of the atmosphere at sea level, you get a height. That means, if the atmosphere had constant density up to that limit height and then cut off to zero, it would have the same mass as the actual atmosphere has. For Earth, that atmospheric scale height is about 8 km, about as high as the highest mountains on Earth btw.
The same concept of a scale height also exists for the gravitational field. Planets have a gravitational potential, which is formally the integral of the gravitational acceleration from ground to infinitely far-away. But you can simplified imagine it as: If the gravitational field would be constant up to a limit height and then would cut off to zero, that’s the scale height. For Earth, that gravitational scale height is about 8000 km, or about 1000x the atmospheric scale height.
The consequence of that is that Earth can hold an atmosphere neatly. Because for every gas molecule in the atmosphere, it is affected by the field of gravity strongly enough to be certainly bound to Earth. We take that as a granted, but consider this:
If the atmospheric scale height of another, fictional planet, was also 8 km but its gravitational scale height was only 4 km, then that would mean that a large part of the atmosphere would be exposed to being above-the-cutoff-height for gravity, so it would be effectively un-affected by gravity and would float away freely from the planet. This would actually not only imply that the planet would lose half of its atmosphere, but all of it. This is because, when the planet loses half its atmosphere, the atmospheric scale height actually doesn’t decrease at all. This is because it’s not like the atmosphere becomes less high, instead it just becomes half as thick everywhere. That also includes the ground level. So you have half the total mass of the atmosphere, but also half the thickness on ground level, so if you divide this, it’s still the same atmospheric scale height (!). This would mean that again, half of it would be above the gravity field and would escape again, and this process would repeat indefinitely until the planet has lost practically all of its atmosphere. Thus the planet could not hold an atmosphere.
That’s why there’s an important relationship between the gravitational potential of a planet and the fact whether the planet can hold an atmosphere at all. This isn’t just about how big the atmosphere can be in total, but whether there’s any atmosphere at all. Below a certain minimum planet mass, that’s completely impossible. Above, it’s possible.
And of course, scientists often just use the non-dimensional number characterizing this; gravitational scale height divided by the atmospheric scale height is the Gandolfi number (Gf). :-)
The official definition says it’s a planet if it’s big enough to be round, which IMHO is a bullshit definition because nobody cares whether your object’s round, as in, for practical settlement purposes.
That’s the second out of the three points of the definition.
As to why it’s not bullshit - the roundness is a byproduct of the object achieving hydrostatic equilibrium (which is the actual criterion, not roundness).
What’s important though is that it’s large enough to hold an atmosphere (at least if it had one).
Define an atmosphere. Because there’s multiple asteroids that technically have one, albeit extremely thin ones. And be careful about being too nitpicky, as Mercury’s atmosphere is just it’s rock being vaporized due to its proximity to the sun
Because there’s multiple asteroids that technically have one, albeit extremely thin ones.
can you please link an example?
Weird how many people seem to think it’s like a competition or something. It’s a descriptive label.
The whole Pluto thing taught us a lot about the psychology of letting go of something taught at a young age. People getting proper frothing at how they shoulda just let Pluto keep it, just to save themselves the extremely minor cognitive dissonance.
When people get upset about pluto, I’ll just tell them if pluto is planet, so is Ceres. Which then results in mindless staring because they never even heard about Ceres…
And Cedna. And Eris. And Makemake. And Haumea. And…
There are about 200 of these space objects that are roughly the size of Pluto.
So either we live in an 8 planetary system, or a 200+ planetary system. But it will never be 9 again.
Yeah. Removing pluto was the more conservative option.
truly it was. still workin on it tho
I really doubt more than .001% actually care if it’s called a planet or not, it’s just a meme to pretend that you care. Like pineapple on pizza.
No one actually cares if you put pineapple on pizza. No one actually cares about Pluto being a planet. But there are many people who see themselves as some sort of white knight defenders of the truth against haters that don’t actually even exist.
I care if you put pineapple on pizza. Please put it on yours. Please. That means less on mine. Not that i dislike it, i just lack the parts to digest it properly.
Pineapple digests you before you digest it!
precisely
I always suspected that the discussion about letting Pluto stay a planet is especially relevant in the US since Pluto was the only planet to be discovered by US scientists … so it’s a point of national pride.
I’ve certainly not seen anyone frothing at the mouth about it in the francosphere. It’s a non-subject, we just updated our textbooks and moved on. Whereas in English-speaking media even reasonable actors mentioning Pluto in passing will pointedly remark on its status one way or another. Americans won’t admit it but the only reason that’s a thing is chauvinism.
It’s funny how being bilingual one spots a lot of small semantic or cultural differences that amount to large paradigm shifts between languages. Like how most French people were taught the hydrocution myth (swimming after a meal supposedly being deadly), older Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping, and English speakers associate vanilla flavour with blandness because of the (English-specific) synonym even though the flavor itself is very powerful and no less overused than e.g. strawberry flavoring.
What’s less funny is how when you point out such a difference some people get Big Mad about it because they can’t admit that some core belief from their childhood is actually a specific sociolinguistic quirk not shared by the rest of the world. People get tribal about the weirdest, most inconsequential shit.
Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping
tbf i believe that too (but about ACs and not fans) and i’m not korean. the reason i believe this is because of my real-life experiences. When AC is running, it typically gives me the sensation that the air it gives off is not just cold, but creepy cold, like an iron rod is not just hard, but hard enough to smash somebody’s skull with it. The same intensity is the coldness from the typical ACs that i’ve experienced. At least some of them.
That’s just because it’s dry by nature. Monitor your indoors humidity and adjust accordingly with a humidifier.
It’s likely most of us Americans don’t know about this fun fact.
Have you seen the lengths people go to in order to not have to change their world view even a smidge? To not have to correct themselves about anything at all? I’ll give you a hint, literally every right wing party in the world doing well is because weak people can’t change a damn thing about themselves.
“World view” is very fitting here.
Not just the right. The entire Taiwan situation is entirely due to the Chinese being taught at school that Taiwan just is part of China like it’s an immutable fact.
I guess the evil Chinese authoritarian school teachers even infiltrated the IMF and told them Taiwan is a province of China.
being taught at school that Taiwan just is part of China
What’s the name of Taiwan’s government again?
China 2 Tawainese Boogaloo
Can’t tell if you’re joking or just a dickhead tankie.
Is it dickish to point out even Taiwan calls itself The Republic of China?
And China calls itself the People’s Republic of China. Which means China on its own does not exist.
Which means The Republic of China is not part of The People’s Republic of China.
Now get your semantic ass out of here.
This isn’t semantics, the “China” they’re referring to is the same place, both governments claim to be the legitimate ruler of all of China, It’s not “The Republic of One Little Island off China” and “The People’s Republic of All of China Except That One Little Island”.
Look at a map of their claimed territories, they’re 95% identical.
Amen.
I’d agree with you but the definition is arbitrary and is not of Natural Kind. Even worse, instead of making the definition of a planet more clear it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.
Honestly, if they just went with defining ‘Major Planets’, ‘Minor Planets’, and asteroids determined by mass and spherical shape, I think everyone would’ve moved on by now.
it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.
If this is true, then please tell me what totally non-arbitrary reason there was for Ceres to not be universally considered a planet?
I’m not sure what you mean. It should be a planet by the definition I gave before unless I didn’t convey what I was trying to say correctly. It’s definitely large, heavy, and spherical enough to be a planet in my opinion.
There’s tons of different sized objects in our solar system and it’s distinguishable enough to qualify in this one.
Size doesn’t matter
Size is a factor. But not everything.
Correct, it’s called planet when it orbits arround the Sun AND has cleaned it’s orbit from asteroids, not the case of Pluto, whose orbit is still full of other objects, some even bigger than Pluto itself.
If it orbits an Planet instead of the Sun, it’s a Moon, even if it is bigger than some other planets.
“All right, Ganymede. You can be a planet, but first you have to clean up your orbit. Start with Jupiter.”
when it orbits arround the Sun AND has cleaned it’s orbit from asteroid
Jupiter, largest of all dwarf planets, shares its orbit with some i don’t know million asteroids.
I’ve often thought that ‘clearing’ it’s orbit is misleading. I believe the definition ought to be changed to ‘controls’ or ‘governs’ its orbit. This allows for objects in stable L4/L5 locations without inviting the caveats that ‘clearing’ needs.
Its because its a colloquial phrase that more or less the media picked up and ran with.
Actual astronomers and astrophysicists use math to describe what they’re talking about, math that you can find and learn fairly easily on wikipedia.
Lay people tend to just evaluate a phrase for its extremely literal meaning, not realizing that it is at best just pop science jargon, short hand to refer to a pretty well defined and precise concept, that is difficult to summarize without losing specificity.
There are many, many other examples of this kind of thing happening with other phrases or terms used to refer to complex concepts.
If those asteroids are on the L1-5 points, they do not count. Since they will stay at that orbit forever.
(pragmatically speaking)
Jupiter has a permanent cloud of asteroids that follow it and neptune crosses the orbit of pluto so neither of those have cleared their orbits so of course they made exceptions so that their contrived definition fits.
Do you mean the asteroids at the Lagrangian points? Every single planet has asteroids there because math/physics dictates those points to be stable. Jupiter has the most at its points because it’s the largest planet.
Same with Neptune cleaning its orbit: It has collided with every single thing in its orbit EXCEPT those that synced their orbits to Neptune. An object that is gravitationally dominated by a single planet should not be a planet under any definition.
Sources because I had to read into your claims and I’m no astrophysicist:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonant_trans-Neptunian_object
Yes, that’s the made up exception. And for neptune not clearing its orbit due to pluto crossing that orbit? Well we have to make an exception for that so…um…the resonance between neptune and pluto. Exception achieved!
The rules are so contrived that it would not make sense for almost any other system except exactly ours. Whatever it takes to keep Earth’s category of “planet” important… you know… for reasons.
Very unscientific but very human.
No.
Lets try a more simple metaphor.
One person is navigating through a crowd, occasionally bumping into other people, having to juke and dodge their way around.
Another person has an entourage or body guards to their front, and two gaggles of papparazzi following behind them, at each 45 degree angle to their rear, as they walk through an entire empty street 4 lane street, with some occsional people walking past the whole scene on the sidewalk.
Pluto and Charon are basically an awkward, clumsy couple trying to get through a densely packed mall or convention.
Neptune is Taylor Swift, as an entire parade float, just, herself, body guards, papparazzi. And I guess she also can have some literal ingroup orbiters who manage to stick around, their lives revolve around her the same way their walking patterns do.
And then maybe, by chance, that awkward couple leaves the convention, gets lost, walks the wrong way to a restaurant, and end up just directly crossing the street that Swift walked down, 6 hours ago.
There, is that a sufficiently relatable visual metaphor to illustrate the difference between the two situations?
It’s a fine metaphor but it doesn’t work for scientific definitions which are exact. The IAU came up with the rule then had to make an exception to their own brand new rule in order to have Neptune remain a planet but not pluto even though both fail the rule. The exception is real and written down, not assumed.
Yet again another of the IAU rules is the body has to be assume hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round). Mercury is NOT in hydrostatic equilibrium and they knew this. So they just…decided… that Mercury is a planet anyway and does not have to follow that rule.
So two planets don’t even follow the rules they made yet were unscientifically decided to be planets. Why? What was the point of it? Certainly wasn’t done for any scientific reason.
Ok, so, Pluto is more spherical than Mercury, but the most important criteria is local gravitational dominance.
Which Mercury has, but Pluto does not.
I do not see how this is a difficult concept to grasp.
Yeah, sometimes you can make a hasty definition, and then refine it to a level of consistent clarity, after it is justly critiqued, though that refined definition may be multi tiered and somewhat complex.
Thats… thats how science works, thats like the entire fundamental concept of it, right there, improving the level of detail to which you understand reality, via empiricism, logic, participatory debate.
The primary purpose of the planet defition refinenment is to emphasize the importance of relative local gravitational dominance.
I’m trying to imagine you using this kind of logic with like, biological taxonomy.
And for neptune not clearing its orbit due to pluto crossing that orbit?
Ah, yes. This is clearly justification for Pluto to become a planet! /s
If the only defense for your viewpoint is to throw out every definition and argument despite their validity, you aren’t arguing in good faith and have no facts to stand on
If the definition of a planet is that it has cleared is orbit then how is Neptune a planet? It shares its orbit with the dwarf planet pluto therefore they should both be dwarf planets correct?
You could just look up the actual astronomical or mathematical definitions of a ‘cleared orbit’ if you wanted to, you know that right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood
As a consequence it does not then share its orbital region with other bodies of significant size, except for its own satellites, or other bodies governed by its own gravitational influence.
This latter restriction excludes objects whose orbits may cross but that will never collide with each other due to orbital resonance, such as Jupiter and its trojans, Earth and 3753 Cruithne, or Neptune and the plutinos.[3]
As to the extent of orbit clearing required, Jean-Luc Margot emphasises “a planet can never completely clear its orbital zone, because gravitational and radiative forces continually perturb the orbits of asteroids and comets into planet-crossing orbits” and states that the IAU did not intend the impossible standard of impeccable orbit clearing.
Pluto and other plutinos are bodies whose orbits are significantly governed by Neptune.
Go look at all the numerical values provided by various algorithms that measure essentially the extent to which a celestial body is locally gravitationally dominant, the extent to which it has ‘cleared its orbit’.
You may notice that everything considered a dwarf planet scores orders of magnitude less, by literally all the metrics, than actual planets.
What rules do you believe make for a definition that isn’t contrived? How do you exclude asteroids from your definition or reject other dwarf planets like Ceres without making up contrived exceptions of your own?
Planets are round, naturally formed bodies orbiting a star. (I know no planet is perfectly round and you can call any defined tolerance “contrived”, but at that point there are no useful and universally fitting definitions for anything in nature. Definitions are always categorizations by human standards)
Many asteroids are round. The list of planets, under your definition, would be so large it isn’t useful anymore. Even when Ceres, Pluto, and Eris were called planets the list was getting too long, and there are several larger than Ceres. Including every nominally round object would be insane.
I propose a better definition:
Planets are very large objects orbitting a star that dwarf everything nearby
I’m pretty sure this is the intent of the IAU’s definition. It’s just more specific.
Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids sit at Lagrange points. Material found there is not counted in the ‘clearing the orbit’ criteria. They are in stable orbits caused by the mass of the planet in question, not in lieu of a massive enough body.
Well of course that was the exception they had to come up with for their contrived rule. The exception is: “whatever it takes to make pluto not a planet”. Since the vote was agenda fueled and not a scientific discussion.
Once something new is discovered and breaks the rules they will have to modify the contrived rule to keep pluto not a planet.
And what agenda is that? To mine the planet in secret so not to upset the environmentalists?
Yes, that’s how science goes. Simple explanations and definitions often fall apart upon further discovery and require caveats that sometimes even reinforce the intention.
I agree except in this instance the goal was to keep Earth’s classification important. No other scientific objective. Just seemed very geocentric to me.
Hold on. What agenda wants Pluto to not be a planet?
“Something something something jews”
- This guy, probably
Someone printed out a buncha shirts with only 8 solar orbits in the system. Obviously easier to lobby Pluto off the team than to reprint the shirts.
Tbf, if you were going to keep Pluto in the definition you’d have to include 200+ other orbits
What is going to be funny is if/when they discover planet 9, and all the apparent Pluto superfans just utterly lose their shit when they attempt to comprehend that there can be another actual planet, and no, pluto still doesn’t count.
And they would have gotten away with it, if not for that one guy arguing about it on Lemmy in 2026.
However, if a moon is sufficiently large compared to its planet, it also gets to be a planet and part of a binary planet system, not a moon.
Aka the Charon-Pluto binary dwarf planet system
But how do we define what orbits what? On the scale from the Sun to Earth, the Moon orbits the Sun, just a litle more wobbly than the Earth’s path, by litle I mean well below the error when we imagine the Erath’s path as an elipse.
We can try to define if something goes around as orbiting, but If I pick two planet from our solar system one will goes around of the other, thechnically orbiting it? We can try to restricting the distance… but that is a problem as well, even worst idea that “nothing” comes in between: multiple moons? What about the moons’ moons?
Ahhh, humans and their need to neatly categorize things…
Just because 2 objects orbit around the same point doesn’t mean they orbit each other. Your entire argument is flawed.
We know what objects orbits each other because of the L4/L5 instability threshold.
Help me understand the point you are trying to make. Are you trying to hand-waive categorization as superfluous to developing broader understanding?
Natural satellites fall within the primary body’s Hill sphere, where the gravity of the larger mass dominates. The Earth/Moon system co-orbits the sun. Saturn has two satellites that orbit each other, and that system co-orbits Saturn.
The point is on which influence yhe orjecy orbits another one. It’s clear that the orbiy arround Earth of the Moon is influenced also by the Sun and in less way even by the other planets, but itt orbits the Earth and not these “influencers”. Thedifference of orbit and gravitanional deviations is pretty clear.
Pluto is a dwarf planet, which is still a planet.
Also, they absolutely should have just made an exception for Pluto so science teachers everywhere could have used that as a fun teaching point.
Considering it’s in a double tidally locked orbit with its own moon Charon and the point that both rotate around is outside Pluto’s volume I would argue that the Pluto/Charon system is actually a dwarf-binary-planet.
I’d okay with that. As long as it’s still technically a planet. (what? it’s my favorite!)
At that point the only really ‘planety’ thing about is is basically that it is spherical.
Its not primarily orbiting the sun, so much as it is the barycenter of itself and charon.
And there are moons that are bigger, and more spherical, and more massive than Pluto.
And while it does have the vaguely heart shaped terrain feature, Mars has a smiley face crater, Saturn has an eternal hexagon on its north and south poles, despite being a gas giant, Jupiter has the spot, Mimas kinda looks like the Death Star, etc.
Everyone loves an underdog
https://youtu.be/xgFKxFX3IwY I recommend watching this video
Also they shouldn’t have called the category of “things that aren’t planets despite being in some ways planet-like” “dwarf planet,” they should have called them “planetoids.” Star Trek had been referring to small planet-like objects as planetoids for decades, so the work in the popular consciousness had already been done. Dwarf planet not being a planet makes it sound like they’re saying dwarf people don’t count as people, and I don’t care for that at all.
Precedent for an exception would go to Ceres not Pluto.
The text book publishers are always looking for a reason to sell new editions.
You would think this is the case but they specifically decided through a vote that a dwarf planet is NOT a planet but a completely separate type of object. The whole vote was ridiculous and done at the very end of the conference so that only a fraction of the members were there to vote on pluto.
Edit: I’m down voted but every word of what I wrote is true. Dig into it and you will find out the same.
Then YOU come up with a definition of a planet that manages to include Pluto while simultaneously excluding Ceres, Charon, Eris, Cedna, Makemake, and 200+ other objects in the solar system large enough to be spherical, some of which are larger than Pluto
The definition of planet should be what it is, a traditional unscientific category based on history… like constellations. Calling Mercury a planet and Jupiter a planet as though they are similar in almost any way is silly scientifically.
Perhaps leave the traditional planets category alone and create new categories that could pertain to all systems not just ours. Maybe something like terrestrial planets, gas planets, dwarf planets… etc. Categories that won’t have to change any time a new discovery is made.
Unless you are Pluto.
Wasn’t it more bc it doesn’t clear it’s surroundings?
And it has an orbit at a different angle than the 8 Planets and at it’s narrowest the ellipse of Plutos orbit is actually closer to the Sun than
UranusNeptune.Edit: That moment when you‘re so done, you fuck up the order of our planets…
Do you mean Neptune? Pluto’s perihelion is 29.7 AU while Uranus’ aphelion is 20.1 AU.
Oh yea, sorry. I was tired, exhausted n stoned n fucked up the correct order of our planets
They did our boy dirty. Never forget!
That’s what I tell my wife but she won’t listen
Come on guys, laugh
We’re laughing with your wife.
What have I done
Oh honey it’s ok
That’s not what she said.
well guess which Moon is also pretty close in size to Mercury
Is it the sun?
Yes. Everyone knows the order goes:
Sun, Sun sized Mercury that laughs at all the little planets, Venus, etc.
I guffawed at this comment
What is yer mum’s bare arse, Trebek!
The one all the cheese comes from?
The answer is obviously Titan
The one that David Bowie’s son did a documentary about?
Mercury used to be bigger than it currently is. The only thing that’s survived the wrath of The Sun is its core.
Mercury is hard core.
please don’t remind me, 1991 was only so long ago.
Git Gud Ganymede, break out of Jupiter’s orbit
The Moon being classified as a Moon despite qualifying as a binary planet. :(
The Earth/Moon system does not qualify as a binary planet because it does not meet the L4/L5 instability threshold. In a system of two orbiting masses, the larger needs to have at least 25x the mass of the smaller for the system to have stable L4/L5 points. Earth is ~80x more massive than the Moon, allowing the system to have stable L4/L5 points, and is therefore a satellite system.
Quick diagram for anyone wondering
L4 and L5 get unstable if the masses orbiting each other are too similar
The barycenter between the Earth and Luna is well within the surface of the Earth. There is no definition where it counts as a binary system
It lacks the je ne se quois of a binary planet. It just doesn’t have the right atmosphere for it, you know.
New York City born and raised.
I distinctly remember a third grade class when the teacher told us that the population nation of Sweden was smaller than the population of New York City.
Nobody does indignation like a 9 year old.
If you’re only counting New York City proper this is true, but the New York City metro area vastly out populates the entire nation of Sweden. (20M vs 10M)
iirc it was NYC 8 mllion and Sweden 7.5 million. No idea what her source was.
“Moon” is more an indictment of the mediocre fusion product of the mass being orbited than any statement about the orbiter.
Damn, shots fired!
Can’t have cleared your orbit around the sun if you don’t orbit the sun.
