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Why did the few astronomers at IAU make a bad job of defining planet and dwarf planet? Because they disregarded the rules of the English language, and disregarded a lot of other astronomers' former use of the word planet.
What the IAU decision partakers (according to rumor, a group of angry planet dynamicists intent on making a power demonstration) did wrong was:
My conclusion: IAU cannot be trusted with such linguistic kind of questions – the members don't have the philosophical insight to understand that the long-term success of their science, is grounded in their ability to communicate with other scientists, and the public who pays their funds. The IAU definition of planet is nil, illegal, void, rubbish, nonsense. I'll use the term "dwarf planet" (bouahahaha!) only in order to lead people away from its usage.
(Whytheh*c did I write this here?? This is an encyclopedia)
This user is not a member of IAU, and would rather cut his/her right arm than ever be! |
A moon can never be a regular planet cause it's a moon. Doi. Like the forest moon of Endor, which must be around the size of Earth.
In comparative planetology you don't have to give a care about where it is and what it does, so they're like 57 round bodies or something. That's where you get the nice graphs of all the stuff like mass vs density. With the dots colored by iciness vs rockiness, and they put a slanted line for the limit of roundness. I saw that in Sky & Telescope once. So it's remarkable that there's like a line, and Mimas is barely above that line, it's the smallest planet, and something like Pallas which is almost twice the size might not be a planet because Pallas has no ice and so is harder to squeeze. The limit of roundness is sharper once density is taken into account.
I really think that the definition of a planet that got passed is beyond flawed. 1) It has to be orbiting the SUN, and not any other star. 2) The cleared its neighborhood bit is a "bit" lacking in clarity. As I understand it the previous week's attempted definition from the conference had been forwarded by Planetary Geologists, but they'd been butting heads with the Orbital Dynamicists who basically pulled a coup on the very last day after the great bulk of the Planetary Geologists had gone home. A moon is a moon regardless of size as long as it is also orbiting something other than a star. In my book if it is primarily orbiting a star; has a mass and/or size on par with Pluto (I know, maybe a bit to arbitrary, but I'm working on a better qualifier), or more massive/larger; it really shouldn't matter if its orbit is seriously inclined, or if its orbit is highly elliptical. When you have planets like Jupiter or larger that can potentially fling Earth sized planets into strange orbits I really think that the types of orbits objects are in have less to do with planethood than size. With the planets (I'll call them this even though they're not going around the Sun) that are being found around other stars we're finding a pretty large number of things Jupiter-sized in Mercury-type orbits, which seems to indicate that even Gas Giant planets can migrate from where they initially formed, so it seems to me that orbital characteristics should have very little to do with planethood. Phil 06:20, 16 June 2007 (UTC)
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