Is Pluto a Planet?

Astronomy ^ | December 29, 2023 | David J. Eicher

[nickcarraway]

They were jealous of Pluto.

[mabarker1]

[Bonemaker]

Not when I was a kid!😀

[broken_clock]

[JJBookman]

Yes he is, both his public-domain self and trademarked versions!

[central_va]

Pluto is right near Uranus.

[DoodleBob]

Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons, the spacecraft that flew by Pluto in 2015, criticized the IAU vote for several reasons: only 424 of its 10,000 members voted; they weren't representative of planetary scientists, who are the experts on planets; and, he says, "you don't legislate science."

[Fiji Hill]

"It has just been learned that Kloog and his space looters have been located on the planet Pluto. With me is Sir Cedric Bogg of the British Instute of Criminology. How far would you say the planet Pluto is?"

"Well, it must be at least a thousand miles away."

--from The Outer Space Looters by the Mad Martians

[rightwingcrazy]

I think arguments about definitions are inane, and changing the meaning of a word well-established in the language is insidious. All they really accomplished by reclassifying Pluto is to annoy a lot of people.

[EvilCapitalist]

Does that make Pluto a Klingon?

[DoodleBob]

Possible ping of interest.

[Repeal The 17th]

There are other dwarf planets besides Pluto:
Haumea, Eris, Ceres, and Makemake!

[EVO X]

Regardless of how it is classified, TPTB decided it was worth the money to send a space probe to investigate.

[FatherofFive]

Pluto is a planette.

[NWFree]

Jealous because they love Uranus

[ealgeone]

Remember....the science is settled.

Think about this in relation to climate change.

[quantim]

Obviously Earth isn’t a planet either by their convoluted logic, these too clever by half nitwits did not take into consideration that most of life was wiped out including the dinosaur era by an asteroid some 65+ million years ago. This asteroid could have been crossing Earth’s orbit for a billion years and obviously Earth never cleared it until that fatal day.

[nickcarraway]

I think they were wiped outby climate change. Or capitalism.

[YouGoTexasGirl]

same with B.C. and A.D. now stated as BCE and CE....bullsh—

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Not only does the earth have a Trojan asteroid, Jupiter has literally thousands of them. Actually, Trojans (unfortunate name, be good, boys) are the MARK of a planet. Trojans are trapped in the L4 and L5 Lagrange points of a planet, and are the result of the planet’s gravity, something that Jupiter has plenty of. The Earth can barely keep one, because they keep getting perturbed away by the tug of other planets like, oh, I don’t know, Jupiter.

An interesting sidelight about Jupiter’s Trojans: They are collected in Jupiter’s L4 and L5 Lagrange points. The first ones discovered were named after Trojan heroes from the Illiad, and were clustered mostly in one of the Lagrange points. When there was a camp discovered in the other Lagrange point they were named after the Greek heroes. Unfortunately, before the convention became settled, some Greeks were in the Trojan camp, some Trojans in the Greek camp. These unfortunate individuals are called “spies”.