Pluto; the (dwarf?) planet

[JamesF]

I'm not sure I care.  It's all "floaty round the Sun stuff" to me.  As long as we all know that we're talking about the same thing when someone says "Pluto" then the job's done as far as I'm concerned.  Just because it's in a different "box" from Jupiter or Neptune, say, doesn't make it any less interesting.

James

[Stub Mandrel]

Classification is a human need, and is a subjective opinion not an objective truth.

It's no different from classifying species. What one person clearly believes are a group of species may be genera or just sub-species, varieties or even indistinguishable from another perspective.

It is abundantly clear that even the old star/gas giant/rocky planet distinction is flaky as we discover brown dwarfs and super-Jupiters, let alone Uranus and Neptune really being 'ice giants' not 'gas giants'. Getting smaller there are no obvious distinctions or sudden discontinuities, except perhaps that between being tectonically active and inert -  which relates to age and circumstance, not size or mass.

My own view, which is worth as little as much as anyone else's opinion from a point of view of semantics, is  that anything that pulls itself round under its own gravity is a planet, and within that you can perhaps identify giant, classic and minor planets. From this perspective a distinction between KBOs, the larger moons and rocky planets seems almost worthless to me - the moons of Jupiter and Pluto seem to have more of interest to science than parched Mercury and our own dear moon would be of little interest if it were not our nearest neighbour.

From a pure scientific viewpoint, surely the classification that matters is one that tells us meaningful things about the bodies themselves - their evolution, their characteristics and their futures. Size, orbit and body orbited again seem almost arbitrary compared to the diversity we see between individual bodies.

Even the simplest of rules - those things that show a disc to the aided eye and aren't a star fails because of the Moon and indeed Jupiter's moons.

[Alien 13]

I like Pluto the planet, I too like our Moon as a planet and most other objects that are named moons as planets.  I am not keen on Jupiter being called a failed star, not with its rocky core unless our Sun has one too. I do think that the recent images of Pluto were a bit of an eye opener with the possibility of liquid water at certain times and dare I say it life.

Alan

[Kn4fty]

Getting put on a t-shirt

"Dear IAU

You mom thought I was big enough!

Love,

Pluto"

[AKB]

3 hours ago, Kn4fty said:

You mom thought I was big enough!

Just check the spelling before you do that!  ?

[Kn4fty]

Hahaha thanks! Stupid autocorrect! ?

[Demonperformer]

3 hours ago, Kn4fty said:

Hahaha thanks! Stupid autocorrect! ?

I think that should be autoINcorrect