Plutoids: a new class of objects beyond Neptune, Astronomy, politics or damage control |
Plutoids: a new class of objects beyond Neptune, Astronomy, politics or damage control |
Jun 12 2008, 09:44 AM
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#1
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Member Group: Members Posts: 340 Joined: 11-April 08 From: Sydney, Australia Member No.: 4093 |
Article on the BBC website: 'Non-planet' Pluto gets new class
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7449735.stm QUOTE Now an IAU committee, meeting in Oslo, has suggested that small, nearly spherical objects orbiting beyond Neptune should carry the "plutoid" tag. It also goes on to say that not everybody is too excited about it: QUOTE "It's just some people in a smoke-filled room who dreamed it up," he told the Associated Press. "Plutoids or haemorrhoids, whatever they call it. This is irrelevant." -------------------- |
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Jun 12 2008, 09:51 AM
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#2
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Member Group: Members Posts: 470 Joined: 24-March 04 From: Finland Member No.: 63 |
While classified as a plutoid, Pluto is still a dwarf planet, as the IAU release says:
"The International Astronomical Union has decided on the term plutoid as a name for dwarf planets like Pluto at a meeting of its Executive Committee in Oslo." -------------------- Antti Kuosmanen
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Jun 12 2008, 12:36 PM
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#3
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Member Group: Members Posts: 809 Joined: 11-March 04 Member No.: 56 |
Plutoid, wow. That must have taken a lot of thought.
Maybe now they can get back to dealing with their backlog of nameless Jovian moons. |
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Jun 12 2008, 01:49 PM
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#4
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Director of Galilean Photography Group: Members Posts: 896 Joined: 15-July 04 From: Austin, TX Member No.: 93 |
Jovoids?
*ba-dump dump ching* -------------------- Space Enthusiast Richard Hendricks
-- "The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible." --Rescue Party, Arthur C Clarke Mother Nature is the final inspector of all quality. |
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Jun 12 2008, 02:11 PM
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#5
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3516 Joined: 4-November 05 From: North Wales Member No.: 542 |
Ganymoids?
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Jun 12 2008, 02:18 PM
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#6
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Director of Galilean Photography Group: Members Posts: 896 Joined: 15-July 04 From: Austin, TX Member No.: 93 |
Galleoids?
Does that make ring particles saturnoids, or ringoids? -------------------- Space Enthusiast Richard Hendricks
-- "The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible." --Rescue Party, Arthur C Clarke Mother Nature is the final inspector of all quality. |
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Jun 12 2008, 03:14 PM
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#7
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2922 Joined: 14-February 06 From: Very close to the Pyrénées Mountains (France) Member No.: 682 |
If they rotate in 24h40 minutes, they'll be Solenoïdes then.
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Jun 12 2008, 07:13 PM
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#8
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1276 Joined: 25-November 04 Member No.: 114 |
LOL
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Jun 12 2008, 09:55 PM
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#9
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Junior Member Group: Members Posts: 38 Joined: 26-September 06 From: New Jersey, USA Member No.: 1183 |
They actually are considering calling Ceres a "ceroid" (and the only one of that category), which sounds way too much like "steroids."
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Jun 12 2008, 10:44 PM
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#10
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Senior Member Group: Moderator Posts: 3241 Joined: 11-February 04 From: Tucson, AZ Member No.: 23 |
I propose Ioids, terrestrial bodies with silicate volcanism from the last 2 billion years. Current members include Io, Earth, Mars, and Venus.
-------------------- &@^^!% Jim! I'm a geologist, not a physicist!
The Gish Bar Times - A Blog all about Jupiter's Moon Io |
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Jun 13 2008, 02:22 AM
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#11
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Director of Galilean Photography Group: Members Posts: 896 Joined: 15-July 04 From: Austin, TX Member No.: 93 |
Duh, we're missing the most obvious one:
Earthoids! And of course Flaming Jupiteroids (for hot jupiters) -------------------- Space Enthusiast Richard Hendricks
-- "The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible." --Rescue Party, Arthur C Clarke Mother Nature is the final inspector of all quality. |
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Jun 13 2008, 03:29 AM
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#12
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1018 Joined: 29-November 05 From: Seattle, WA, USA Member No.: 590 |
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Jun 13 2008, 04:22 AM
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#13
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Member Group: Members Posts: 599 Joined: 26-August 05 Member No.: 476 |
The ones there are classed as hemorrhoids.
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Jun 13 2008, 04:26 AM
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#14
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Member Group: Members Posts: 307 Joined: 16-March 05 Member No.: 198 |
A space.com article on the issues gives a few quotable comments from Alan Stern and others.
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0806...uto-planet.html Stern: "The derision for this group [the IAU] is now spreading virally". Mark V. Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute: "The IAU is embracing a 19th-century world view, back before we had spacecraft, landers, orbiting telescopes and other modern means of understanding the physical characteristics of objects." Expect more ructions later in the year. According to the article: "Scientists will take the whole debate up at a meeting Aug. 14-16 at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. There, meeting co-organizer Hal Weaver said nobody will vote, but researchers will 'address this question in terms of a scientific conference'." ====== Stephen |
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Jun 13 2008, 04:54 AM
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#15
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Merciless Robot Group: Admin Posts: 8785 Joined: 8-December 05 From: Los Angeles Member No.: 602 |
Oh, God....here we go again. ...time to get out the Advil.
Let me just restate what seems to me at least to be the correct perspective. Natural objects exist along a continuum. Conversely, people tend to categorize things, and get upset when a given object doesn't seem to fit neatly into one category or another. The ONLY top-level objects in the Universe that are apparently discrete, distinct, and identical to each other are hadrons & leptons; everything else is kinda fuzzy, somewhere in-between. (I do not expand that definition to include atoms because of isotopes; the exception that proves the rule is the chemical behavior of deuterium & tritium, which differs from that of basic hydrogen in many fundamental ways.) Therefore, the term 'planet', undoubtedly like most of our terminology for probably all nouns, is subjective. Fomenting long, bitter debates over what does and what does not "deserve" this term doesn't serve any practical purpose at all, and frankly might become a seriocomic, rather embarrassing spectacle in the eyes of the general public...who well might be wondering why all these PhDs making the mythical big bucks are wasting time on the issue. Pluto is a/an [insert opinion here]. Fine. Just insert an opinion, and then leave it alone. -------------------- A few will take this knowledge and use this power of a dream realized as a force for change, an impetus for further discovery to make less ancient dreams real.
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