Fight for Pluto !, A Campaign to Reverse the Unjust Demotion Options

[mars loon]

Dear Friends,

Today I am extremely dissapointed that the Pluto Demoters have triumphed.

I respect their opinion, but disagree with it.

I strongly agree with Alan Stern's statement calling it "absurd" that only 424 astronomers were allowed to vote, out of some 10,000 professional astronomers around the globe.

This tiny group is clearly not at all representative by mathematics alone.

I believe we should formulate a plan to overturn this unjust decision and return Pluto to full planetary status, and as the first member of a third catagory of planets, Xena being number two. Thus a total of 10 Planets in our Solar System

Please respond if you agree that Pluto should be restored as a planet.

ken

Ken Kremer
Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton
Program Chairman

[Greg Hullender]

I really like "planetoid" too, but Alan Stern thinks it's too diminutive.

I guess we'll have a better idea of what taxonomy to use once we can get real details on extra-solar planets, but there do seem to be some obvious break points that merit some recognition. e.g.

1) Star (big enough to fuse hydrogen)
2) Jovian Planetoid (big enough to have a hydrogen atmosphere)
3) Terrestrial Planetoid (big enough to be round)
4) Asteroid (not big enough to be round)

You could divide 3 and 4 between "made out of rock" and "made out of ice".

Then you could have separate categories for graviational/associational properties. e.g.

1) Independent Planetoid (dominates it's region of space).
2) Twin Planetoid (has a companion at least 1/25th its mass but not more more than 25x).
3) Bound Planetoid (forced into some sort of orbital resonance with a larger planetoid).
4) Satellite Planetoid (directly orbits a larger planetoid).

One could play around with the definition of "dominates"; there might also be value in distinguishing planetoidsin circular orbits above the equator of the star (as having formed from the accretion disk) from planetoids in tilted, elliptical orbits (as having formed separately from the original nebula). Some term to differentiate airless planetoids from those with atmospheres might also make sense.

The general idea, though, is that a richer taxonomy might be well worthwhile, and it's probably easier to get there if we use a term like "planetoid" rather than "planet."

--Greg

[JRehling]

I guess we'll have a better idea of what taxonomy to use once we can get real details on extra-solar planets [...]
The general idea, though, is that a richer taxonomy might be well worthwhile, and it's probably easier to get there if we use a term like "planetoid" rather than "planet."

--Greg

I think the species we already know about defy the notion of a biological-style taxonomy, even a shallower one.

Size, composition, orbital-clearing, nature of the atmosphere, and most other attributes are going to be freely cross-correlated to a considerable extent. There will be massive worlds that haven't cleared their orbits, there are going to be massive (hot) worlds with no atmosphere, tiny worlds that have ended up spherical, etc. There'll be a worlds representing the full range of hydrogen as an atmospheric component.

I think the exercise will prove to be rather like looking at an employee data base and searching for a way to relate salary, gender, and department. In the final analysis, you just end up with a bunch of metrics and you note how individuals measure according to each metric.

That might be what it takes to get us to discard the bogus categories in our solar system wherein nine data points happen to spell out some perceived categories but don't do so ontologically and certainly won't as more data comes in.

The stuckness that has to break is the notion that such categories have a service to play even when the universe provides no such categories. Larger KBOs may break the logjam there in the short run, but extrasolar discoveries will end up doing so in the long run.