Pluto's planet status

Not only that, but what will all those poor astrologiers do, they can't include pluto in all the charts now.Does that mean the chart I got is obsolete?

Modulous writes: I understand the precedent was set by the terms stars and dwarf stars already in use.What's the story on that? Is a dwarf star considered a star?

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Archer

If we didn't have moon's bigger than planets then there would be no problem ... everything would orbit the earth and things would be much cleaner to set arbitrary labels on.Personally I think the major contributions are ...... finding the numbers of distinct bodies orbiting within the solar system,... seeing how they fit into concepts of how the solar system formed over astronomical time spans... how that contributes to our understanding of the formation of distinct bodies orbiting other star systems (binaries?)... different kinds of distinct bodies and their association with orbit and the mass of the central star... how the numbers, sizes and compositions of the distinct bodies orbiting other distinct bodies contributes to the above information... etc.Now we could also say that every 'distinct body' is a planet, that the earth and moon are a binary planet system orbiting the sun, that the jupiter and saturn (etc) systems operate as sub-solar systems orbiting a central system (and I'm sure if we look close enough we will find objects orbiting moons), but classifications just get so messy when you have to dea with arbitrarily formed randomly distributed clumps of matter ...So now we have three 'kinds' of distinct objects:(1) hard rocks -- mercury, venus, earth, mars and numerous moons and asteroids,(2) gas giants -- jupiter, saturn, uranus, neptune, and(3) ice balls -- pluto and its 'moon' and other new friends, and the controversy will rage whether these need to be broken down further to separate out(?) oort cloud objects -- cometsBut they are still distinct bodies formed from the original matter of the solar system and in general orbit about the center of mass of the solar system (whether they form binary or other subsystems in the process).enjoy.

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we are limited in our ability to understand
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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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Once upon a time, everything did orbit the earth. But then some busybody name Copernicus stuck his nose in, and things have been messy ever since

and then Tyco Brahe stepped up and smushed even that.Edited by jar, : No reason given.

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Aslan is not a Tame Lion

From the Earth's perspective, everything does revolve around it. Earth is of course the standard for what a 'planet' is... if we wanted to get specific enough, there is only one planet. Earth, afterall is the only planet with life on it.So, why do you seek the living among the dead (dead planets)?

Was the moon a "temporary planet" when men walked on it?

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Not when thought about, as Copernicus did. The heliocentric solar system model is a result of applying Occam's Razor to the epicycles required in the Ptolomeic Model to explain retrograde motion of the outer planets. So from Earth's perspective, everything does not revolve around it if the perspective is proper.Of course you may mean that the universe revolves around humanity, or that the world revolves around some given individual. But that would be an egocentric universe. Maybe for two reasons. One is that we don't absolutely know they are dead, especially the moons Europa and Titan. The second is that some of those of a scientific bent are uncomfortable with an egocentric universe.

Hey Ringo,

See? I'm not always a trouble-maker. Sometimes I'm just a joker.

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well if you want to be PC is dwarf usable ??
maybe it should be a diddy planet , or a semi-planetany way calling dwarf planet will confuse sci fant readers into think its the homew of dwarves and they start to look for elf , orch and goblin planet s ...this is NOT a joke .. hehehe

you're right -- see Jack Higgins (click) for more on this aspect of the situation ...the problem is that we don't have any other word for a large ball of stuff. we inherited "planet" and "moon" from old views of what they were and they have become to mean what the planets (that we know) are, sort of a reverse definition.And the difference between planet and moon has always been curious as well. If you redefined "planet" to be any body larger than the largest moon ... that would cut out mercury as well. If you redefined it to be limited to objects bigger than the smallest moon ... then Pluto stays due to charon (and several others ... the asteroid Ida is orbited by dactyl ... )see Natural satellite - Wikipedia (note already changed to show pluto as a 'dwarf planet')I think we'll find that the term planet stays, just because of a lack of other suitable terms that don't seem silly. And we'll probably get stuck with 'dwarf' for the same reason.these are what I got from thesaurus.com
404: This page could not be found but even those are not "planet" synonyms, they are for "terrestrial planet" (best fit) "earth" (just us) and "globe" and certainly both "earth" and "globe" traditionally only apply to this one planet.Probably except that "planet" already seems like its a diminuative, the most sensible would be "planetlet" ("planetet" is just silly and "planetkin" just seems weird)Call it an ice planet, like the gas giants are gas giant planets and the others are 'terrestrial' planets.Why do we need to keep the number small enough to count on two hands anyway?

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RebelAAmericanOZen[Deist
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quote:

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well if you want to be PC is dwarf usable ??

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Volumetrically-challenged?

actually, seeing as the aspect used to predict the existence of planets -- extrasolar and pluto --that should be mass-challenged.(as long as catholics don't get offended ... )

well if we had 100 planets they would never finish the horoscopes in time for the morning paper ..... sorry could not resisti think our friendly 9 opss 8 planets , and knowing the names of them helps us with our idea of where we are in the universe , we know the places on the local map , us and the next few towns , make it 50 and the scale is too big to be loacal , keep the other bodies for those who like toknow all the street names of their town .and as a mate pointed out , the term dwarf is already use to class stars , so why not planets .further given the recent new data that has lead to this , are we likely to have to revise the naming again is say 20 years given pace of discoveries ??