Pluto on the Bubble

Except that there are complaints of arbitrariness, I like that there's a nice... hmm... astronomical feel to it. Certainly, there are binary and trinary stars. The article at Space.com speculates that there might also trinary (and binary at Pluto) planets.
 
I don't mean to complicate things further, but I thought plutons were masses of magma that solidified underground before reaching the surface. Just sayin' . . .
 
I welcome new objects being called planets. Shows we're progressing. NPR had a story on this morning that said that there might be as many as 44 new objects that could be classified as planets. That would be wonderfully cool.

Taking away Pluto's status as a planet is rather like revisionist history IMO. Plus, it'd be nice to finally have a formal definition of a word that has been in use for 2500 years.
 
A bit off the subject, I wouldn't mind re-naming Uranus. That poor planet is the butt of too many jokes.
 
What will astrologers do? Will charts be updated? I need to know because mine said I will be rich in a year but that was based on a 9 planet chart.
 
Hishighness said:
Damn right they should! All these morons pressuring them to remove it's planetary status should be ignored.
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Absolutely, next you might have to accept things like humans being related to animals and other crap like that.

The problems when the public becomes involved with a scientific debate seem pretty clear.
 
toddjh said:
I think any definition of "planet" will have to be arbitrary in some way: arbitrary restrictions on size, shape, distance from the sun, eccentricity of its orbit, etc. So I have a feeling the definition we eventually come up with will place the arbitrary dividing lines such that Pluto is a planet and the other similar Kuiper belt objects aren't.
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Easy, if they where discovered before 1950 they get to be planets.
 
Beleth said:
I welcome new objects being called planets. Shows we're progressing. NPR had a story on this morning that said that there might be as many as 44 new objects that could be classified as planets. That would be wonderfully cool.

Taking away Pluto's status as a planet is rather like revisionist history IMO. Plus, it'd be nice to finally have a formal definition of a word that has been in use for 2500 years.
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Not really, pluto was orrigionaly thought to be bigger than the earth, it turned out to be smaller than orrigionaly thought. This would be a case of changeing terminolgy to fit with new data not revisionist history.
 
chracatoa said:
How about the ones we find/found after 1950 orbiting other systems?
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They get different dates. And as they all need to be pretty big jovian type planets for current technology to find them, classifying them as planets is pretty easy. I guess some of them are massive enough that they might count as stars depending on definition of when is something a planet vs a brown dwarf.
 
ponderingturtle said:
Is that the standard basis for determining binarys for stars?
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Er, probably not, because there's no other option for a configuration of stars.

I may not be fully understanding your question.

Only smaller bodies -- planets and such-like -- have been observed to arrange themselves in satellite-like configurations, where body A orbits body B, while the joint A-B system orbits body C as a unit. The likelihood of two stars forming closely enough that their barycentre was within one of the stars, while still remaining separate bodies, is close to zero; they would simply collapse into a single star instead.
 
drkitten said:
Er, probably not, because there's no other option for a configuration of stars.
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Why not? Why should binary planets have this funky defintion and requirement to meet but stars get a free pass

I may not be fully understanding your question.

Only smaller bodies -- planets and such-like -- have been observed to arrange themselves in satellite-like configurations, where body A orbits body B, while the joint A-B system orbits body C as a unit. The likelihood of two stars forming closely enough that their barycentre was within one of the stars, while still remaining separate bodies, is close to zero; they would simply collapse into a single star instead.
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At formation, what about now? I thought there had been some neutron stars and such observed in very close orbits.

In the past when the moon was closer would it have qualified as a binary planet then? Earth/moon system was a binary planet for 300 million years but after that it became a single planet with a moon?

Edit:Opps, the earth moon system was not yet a binary planet, but will be in a few million years, so all the moon has to do is bide its time and wait, planethood is in its future.
 
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ponderingturtle said:
Why not? Why should binary planets have this funky defintion and requirement to meet but stars get a free pass
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Because stars don't assemble themselves -- at least, not for very long -- into funky configurations.



At formation, what about now? I thought there had been some neutron stars and such observed in very close orbits.
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Not that close. That close, they collapse. See this page from the APS for an illustration


In the past when the moon was closer would it have qualified as a binary planet then?
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No... in the future, when the moon is more distant, it will eventually qualify as a binary planet. I doubt the cockroaches will care.
 
If we get rid of Pluto, who will I know what My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us?

This is all very silly, in my opinion. This is not a scientific debate. Adding or removing Pluto from the list of planets does nothing to further our understanding or knowledge of the universe. It is important to know that there's this rock out beyond Neptune (most of the time) that orbits the Sun. Whether we call it a planet or not matters very little. I'm calling it "Bob".
 
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