Eight planets

Wow.
Can't believe nobody's posted this yet.

We now live in a planetary system consisting of eight planets.

No more. No less.

Eight.
Eight is the number of the counting. And the number of the counting is eight.
Nine is right out...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/5282440.stm

 

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lol, I love it. man I have to watch that movie again.

the reason I didn't post it is that pretty much everyone would know already. moreover, people who have been following this, could see Pluto's demise coming swiftly. after all, its obvious that it is a kuiper (SP?) belt object, and it would be inconsistant not do include all the other garbage out there.

 

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Sorry Clyde, 'Eight' is enough, especially when it comes to planets in our solar system. At least that's what they're telling us now.

 

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I think for most of us this isn't news. Cosmologists have been saying for many generations that it is impossible to say how many planets there are, or that it entirely depended on your definition for planets.

Only the general-science grade-school books teach the simple view that there are 9 planets, period.

 

Ridiculous waste of time and effort over nothing. This reverting to 8 still wont put the issue to rest. There is so much criteria you could chose for the classification of a planet that you never will exhaust all conflicts. Tradition, moons, size, not positioned in the kuiper belt.....The whole thing has no definitve solution.

 

Eight planets? Not according to the IAU resolution. There are now just four planets: Mercury, Venus, Saturn, and Uranus. The IAU definition of "planet" unintentionally strips the Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune from the planethood. None of these <strike>planets</strike> orbiting bodies has "cleared the neighborhood around their orbits".

 

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It's totally ridiculous, wouldn't you say.

 

And I thought Jupiter was considered a star that stubbornly refused to turn on. Isn't there still some chance that it will consume enough extra mass to create a binary system here? Especially since it should survive the Sun's burn-out, and we should collide with another solar system (even within another galaxy) eventually.

 

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Image this!

 

Not unless you have an extra million big black monoliths in your back pocket that you mind don't dumping into Jupiter for a little extra mass.

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to bad still... their most simply 9 planets, who cares wat other idiots think
Their can be nine for the sole purpose that their always have been 9.

 

It only needs to be 60 times more massive than it already is.

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By the way, don't mess with Europa either.D

 

???
Europa is a moon not a planet

 

nope, moons are planets because they also circle around the sun.

 

Pluto's a fucking cartoon dog... getalifewhydon'tya?

 

No one said it was.

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Is the IAU's planet definition in only English? I assume that at least official French and German version exist, but does any one know and can give reference to at least the exact English wording?

In my local (Portuguese) paper the key word used, translates back into English either as "dominate" or "clear (out)"

Few realize that the moon does not go around the Earth, but around the sun in an orbit that is almost exactly the same as that of the Earth. Both 'wiggle" a little while going in essentially a circular orbit about the sun. (Moon "wiggles" more of course, but is in essentially the same orbit as the Earth is.) The wiggle of the moon is so small that if you look at the entire moon orbit on a scale that permits that orbit to be displayed on your computer screen, than you will not even notice that "wiggle."

You are so brain washed into thinking that "the moon goes around the Earth" that you will find this hard to believe, so here are the facts:

421,700km is moon's max distance from Earth and 353 700 is the least so to keep things simple let us agree that at times the moon is 4x10^5km closer to sun and about 14 days later 4x10^5km more distant than the Earth is.

The Earth is on average 1 astronomical unit, 1AU, from the sun. 1AU = 1.5x10^8km

Thus the "bumps" or "wiggles" on the nearly circular orbit of the moon about the sun are deviations of (4/1.5)x10^-3AU, or less than 0.003AU

If I could I now would draw a circle for display on your computer screen it would have radius 1.000 with approximately 13 cycles of very small radial modulation along it, but the amplitude of this graphed modulation is less than 0.003, so you would not be able to see this tiny deviation from "perfect circularity", so why bother.

The point is well established numerically. - The Moon goes around the sun in essentially the same circular orbit as the Earth does. Ergo, the Earth has not "clear out" its orbit and is not a planet if the term the IAU has used is "clears out". If word the IAU used is "dominate" then perhaps the Earth can be a planet still.*

I do not really care if Earth is a planet with a moon or only the larger member of a "planetoid pair." I mainly want people to understand that both Earth and moon are in essentially the same orbit around the sun. - Definitely the moon does not go around the Earth. It appears to do so only because we view it from a moving platform. I could equally well (when riding on a train), say the trees beside the road are moving to the rear.

That is why I said the critical word in the new planet definition must be "dominate" and not "clear" (out) as most here seem to be saying it is.
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*It is still a “close call” as the moon is the largest of all the “moons” relative to the larger body (Earth in this case) so of all the planets in the solar system, the Earth is the least “dominate” in its orbit.

From being God’s center of the universe, to center of the solar system, to planet orbiting the sun, to the least dominate planet, to perhaps not even a planet, is enough to make me re consider the merits astrology :bugeye:

 

Let's put it this way, Pluto 'Use' to be planet. Now it's not. It's now classified as a 1,410 mile dia. 'Potatoe'. Too bad Clyde.

 

Now they are in the process of discovering 3 more planets, so the total will be 11 planets. I think 2 of them are named Hercules and Xena and the rest right now have numbers and letters as names.