Sign the Pluto Petition

JLengi

A bit harsh. But true. Sentimentality has no place in astronomical definitions or designations. If Pluto is a planet, then so is Xena and so are a lot of other objects out there. But we're better off just calling them Kuiper Belt objects. They have much in common with each other but little in common with the other eight planets.

el_pablo

Yeah Screw Pluto!! Just because the discoverer is an American, they don't want to give up on Pluto actual status. Me

Jeremy Falcon

el_pablo wrote:

Just because the discoverer is an American, they don't want to give up on Pluto actual status.

That's about an asinine of a statement as they come.

Jeremy Falcon The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it is open. - Colin Angus Mackay (2006-08-18)

Jeremy Falcon

Kastellanos Nikos wrote:

What drives those people is not reason, but emotion.

I agree. I was actually going to sign the petition until I read it. There wasn't one good piece of material that suggested it should be a planet on that petition, CNN did a better job of that for crying out loud. :laugh:

Jeremy Falcon The mind is like a parachute. It works best when it is open. - Colin Angus Mackay (2006-08-18)

Paul Watson

Jeffry J. Brickley wrote:

Compared to most Astronomy subjects, more money has been spent in the reduction of Pluto's planetary status than any other subject. The few exceptions are black holes, and other quantum objects/exceptions.

Are you serious? Can you really back that claim up? As for AIDS and cancer I doubt astronomers would be of much help solving them :)

regards, Paul Watson Ireland FeedHenry needs you

Shog9 wrote:

eh, stop bugging me about it, give it a couple of days, see what happens.

Dan Neely

Paul Watson wrote:

As for AIDS and cancer I doubt astronomers would be of much help solving them

SETI ;P:laugh::-D

Geoff Gariepy

Yes, let's not have any wars over the silly petition. Gee, whiz, if you don't agree with it, don't sign. :) People are awfully worked up over nomenclature, which is sort of the point of the petition in the first place. :confused: "They" ought to just grandfather Pluto into the Planets club, and everything else that's like it discovered from now on can be called a dwarf planet, "trans-Neptunian object" or whatever science deems necessary. Yes, this is an emotional appeal. Why else would I make this sort of appeal, it's not like I'm an astronomer, I'm a Perl and C# developer. :laugh: All I know is that if I were one of Tombaugh's great grandchildren, I'd be more than a little upset about it. Heck, I'm not an astronomer and I'm no relation to his family and I find it a little upsetting. :-O --Geoff

Baj22

Wow, good point. As an American, I completely agree. We should remove Pluto as a planet and re-enter it as "The United States of Pluto" and make it king of the planets because we Americans do everything out of our foolish pride.

El Corazon

Paul Watson wrote:

Are you serious? Can you really back that claim up?

can you pull the microfiche on newspapers in Las Cruces and Alamogordo, NM since 1940's? Clyde Tombaugh retired here, so there was a great deal of local controversy over our resident. Astronomers would come from all over just to give speeches in our backwater community to show us that our resident knew nothing and convince us to throw him out as science has done. Google won't produce one result, but many results on the controversy of Pluto. Because Pluto was a controversy from almost day one. True AIDS and Cancer research probably weren't hurt by the Astronomers per se, but since the Astronomers were using their government grants for Apollo objects (threats to Earth) to research Pluto to downgrade it, there was often the demand for more money in finding Apollo objects because the money was being syphoned off. Governments pretty much gave up the search for a new planet after Tombaugh's statement, but various governments have been concerned about asteroid impacts, especially after a few "snuck up" on us because people were looking at Pluto instead of other parts of the sky. Of course, the Astronomers defend that even if they had not been looking at pluto with the time alotted for Apollo object searches, there is never a gaurentee to find anything "unknown" until it gets close enough to become "obvious" -- however, as a few people pointed out, if you never look, there is the gaurentee you will never find it. :) Think rather that the money was ill spent and required additional grants and budget extensions world-wide from money that could have been spent on many things other than trying to prove Pluto is or is not a planet. :)

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

El Corazon

dan neely wrote:

then how did far smaller and less dense Ceres form itself into a sphere?

there are some theories... One of the most accepted "with current knowledge" is that it once took a low orbit toward the sun, close proximity to the sun, like Mercury heated the rock slowly molding it to round. A near miss (why don't they call it a near hit) with another astronomical body changed the orbit to where it is now. It is one reason why we would like to land on Ceres and see if it perhaps has a hard core and a very light surface (which would spread out the light material evenly around a say iron core) -- which is one of the other more common theories. Think pumice around an iron core.

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

El Corazon

Kastellanos Nikos wrote:

I insist on searching for a perfect platetary system where we can find aliens with -common- sence!

If you blow us up in an interplanitary war and I am telling on you!! ;P

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

El Corazon

dan neely wrote:

That's an unprovable assertion since we currently cannot detect any planets in a solar system like our own. Our inner planets are too light, our massive ones too distant.

actually it is not unprovable, since we have found very few large planet systems with even planes as ours. Although we can only detect the larger planets, to medium planets, nothing as small as Earth. Very few fall all in near the same plane. Even the larger planets in other systems follow pluto like orbits against other giants, making for very strange orbits. It would be like putting Neptune and Jupiter in orbits as eccentric as Pluto. We would consider that strange, because our system doesn't look that way, but it seems in the exoplanet world, that it is more common to have a few planets in an off plane orbit with a strong eccentricity. Making pluto the rule, not our planets. So, as I said, the fact that pluto has an eccentric orbit in no way disqualifies it as a planet since even gas giants in other systems follow Pluto-like orbits. To base a definition on its orbit alone, we would have to disqualify one of the largest gas-giants every found (I can't remember if it has been demoted once or twice, I mostly remember its discovery and first demotion).

_________________________ Asu no koto o ieba, tenjo de nezumi ga warau. Talk about things of tomorrow and the mice in the ceiling laugh. (Japanese Proverb)

Gary R Wheeler

You know something, I would really like it if you would go away now. You openly advocate ignorance of the universe outside the planet we live on :|. In your sig, you also quote from a forum post on www.dailywtf.com that disparages the work of contributors to The Code Project :mad:.

Software Zen: delete this;

Fold With Us![^]

joeyjr

Joseph Jones :confused: :cool:

rancir

Of course, by the time we discover a truly advanced civilization we will be completely unable to communicate with them. They'll actually want to talk, and we'll only be able to communicate by blackberry. The first interplanetary incident will probably be when our first contact specialist rudely ignores the alien ambassador in order to read his IM's or answer his cell phone!

BoneSoft

JLengi wrote:

Sentimentality has no place in astronomical definitions or designations

Very true... But the logic to disqualify Pluto is flawed, and we don't even know if there really is a Kuiper Belt, much less the nature of it. One article said that a "Planet" had to follow 3 rules: 1. Orbit the sun. 2. Be large enough to have a fairly spherical shape. 3. Must have accumulated all (or most) matter in it's path. They disqualified Pluto because it's orbit passes through Neptunes, so they claim #3 was broken. So why is Neptune not disqualified from planet status on the same grounds?