[X] My Assistant

[Guest_Myran_*]

NASA sponsored astronomer Michael Brown of CIT just announced he have found a 10'th planet.
The claim was made for one object based on its brightness alone and that for one object at 3 times the distance of Pluto. In short its smack in the middle of the belt of other KBO's.
The guy claim he was forced to reveal his data since a hacker had threatened to release information about the object.
Im strongly unconvinced about that story.
Why then claim it to be a planet rightoff. More likely think this guy must be looking for the fame of Clyde Tombaugh.
Without any infrared measurements or to establish the albedo properly which would have given a guesstimate of the objects size he singlehandedly claim a KBO planet, this should get the Bad astronomy 1'st price prize for preposterous extrapolation from a single unconvincing piece of scientific data.

[Guest_Myran_*]

CosmicRocker: When I posted this, we didnt have much information either.
But thank you for the info and links.
It turned out that this discovery got a lot of attention in another thread whereas my post here got left in the cold until now. But it will be interesting to learn what
IAU thinks.

volcanopele: If its somewhat larger or smaller than Pluto doesnt matter.
If we could timetravel and tell Clyde Tombaugh and the astronomical community back then the true size of the object they had found -Pluto-, im certain they would he have to think not only once or twice before using the term 'planet' for one object of the diminutive size it turned out to have. Size alone, and now we know so much more and have put Pluto into a context, if the discovery of Pluto had taken until recent years, im personally certain we wouldnt have this discussion at all!

Viewing the other discussion of this same subject here, it obvious than many have gotten so used to the notion that Pluto is a planet that we might have to live with that idea.
But one mistake made 70 years ago, does in no way neccesitate that we make the same mistake again!
-"-

(Some background that might or might not be correct written off the top of my head from what I remember reading in many old astronomical textbooks:
Pluto was named a planet at its dicovery for several reasons, one of them that it was thought to be much larger and massive than what it eventually turned out to be.
Pluto was thought to be so massive that it affected the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, when astronomers couldnt match the values they had gotten for Plutos albedo, magnitude and the resulting size there were some wild suggestions that Pluto would about 5000 km and be incredibly dense. Another suggestion was that we did only see Pluto as a starlike object since we did only see the reflection of the sun in one ocean of liquid gas of a larger world.

Plutos status as a planet have been questioned before, then in connection with speculations that it might be one escaped moon of Neptune - turned out to be wrong, Neptune have brought Pluto into a resonance but they might not have had any common past at all, with the exception of Triton that could turn out to be Plutos twin.)