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The editors at the Post are chagrined that Pluto has clout.
Having originally immigrated from PLANET Pluto, a spokesperson for john kerry stated that he is highly offended by this racist article! ;-)
LLS
We need a fence to protect our way of life.
Just another plutocracy, nothing to see here.
Looks like someone has a chip (or pluton) on his shoulder.
Its Bush's fault!
Currently they're operating with the idea that planets are round and are proposing keeping the eight main planets as the core planets and also including some trans-Neptunian planets. Under this arrangement Charon, Pluto's moon, is considered a trans-Neptunian planet because Charon and Pluto are essentially orbiting each other--their center of mass is outside the surface of Pluto and they both orbit this point.
This is a sham foisted upon a public by scientists that are unwilling to admit Pluto was mis-classified as a planet decades ago.
If a change is made, it should be to REMOVE Pluto from the listing of planets and add it to either the comets or the asteroids category.
Of course, removing Pluto would be an admission by science that it is wrong....so they will compound the error by bastardizing the definition of planet.
Any global warming/evolution fans out there want to say scienstists are unbiased?
It sounds to me like somebody's way too tolerant of a misbehaving dog. Maybe some obedience school is called for.
Mark
This new planet definition, pardon the pun, stinks to high Heaven. A new class of planetoid, fine. Honorary planet status for Pluto given it's history, but no more new planets, alright. But any freakin' snowball that managed to get itself rounded out? Gimme a break, we'll have hundreds if not thousands of "planets" by the time the cosmic dust clears.
Clyde Tombaugh Forever! :D
Lotsa great tagline fodder there.
The term "pluton" is already in use in geology to mean an intrusive body of molten rock which cools and crystallizes at depth rather than erupting. Maybe they should call the new class of solar-system objects "pluted pups," after the term used for Pluto the dog in an early Mad comics Disney parody.
When you wake up tomorrow, is it really going to make a difference whether some group of geeks say we have eight "planets", nine planets or twelve planets?
Ceres made the cut as a planet when it was first found on the first day of the Nineteenth Century by a Sicilian Monk. It was named for Ceres, the goddess of grain and the harvest and the patroness of Sicily.
Ceres plays an interesting role in the history of astronomy and mathematics. Determination of her orbit by Gauss was one the first and most spectacular applications of the method of least squares, vaulting the young German mathematician to forefront of the applied mathematics and popularizing least squares.
When hundreds of other main belt asteroids were discovered in similar orbits, it was decided that they all couldn't be planets and so Ceres and all the other main belt asteroids were demoted to the status of "asteriod".
It is doubtful (to me, someone else can do the math) whether or not Ceres would survive in that orbit if she were made of water. Most of the main belt asteroids depend on tensile strength to survive, they are tidally disrupted by Jupiter, which is why they have not merged to form a real planet, gravity is insufficient to hold them together.
I'm a big admirer of Clyde W. Tombaugh (whom I once heard lecture in person) but it's nuts to loosen the definition of planets just to make sure Pluto still qualifies. What if they find a dozen Kuiper Belt Objects that are Pluto's size or larger? Will they all be regarded as planets?