You'll have to rip Pluto as a planet from my cold, dead fingers.* I think the reasoning of these people makes sense. Ben pointed out years ago when we visited the Boston Museum of Science (which had a planetarium program my brother designed) that you could look at the floor markings in the Astronomy exhibit and tell where they had removed Pluto.
Pluto is the 8th planet for a lot of its circuit, because of its elliptical orbit.
*During the 250th, I saw a FB post that read "You will have to take the July 4th fireworks from my cold, dead fingers. Which are lying right over there across the street."
6 comments:
It turns out there never really was a strict definition of planet, so there's no reason a question like "is Pluto a planet?" should have a definitive answer. But the claim that Pluto should b called a dwarf planet or planetoid because its orbit is too elliptical doesn't even make sense.
Yes, when all this was going down a geologist waspishly remarked that geology had no definition for continent and got on fine.
I always heard that the reason to demote it to "dwarf planet" was that it hadn't "cleared its orbit." I've also heard that was a dumb reason.
I think the real reason is that, if you let Pluto be a planet, you have no reason not to let a large number of Kuiper Belt objects also be planets and you wind up with a list of planets about thirty entries long. Which is not exactly an astronomical reason.
I've been trying to publish a live link for "Pluto Tells All" and failing. Here it is less elegantly:
http://windoffthehilltop.com/h-Pluto.html
It's because they themselves are OCD, and think that if there are 30 more, peoploe will feel obligated to memorise them. That they could have said "Technically, there are 30 more things that are just as much a planet as Pluto," and 99.99% of the world would say "Yeah fine, we don't care. We're stopping at Pluto, please don't bring it up again" did not even occur to them. The rest of us would have been fine. Part of Michigan should belong to Wisconsin, and a tiny piece of Minnesota should belong to Canada...but they don't and life goes on and we deal with it.
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