Comment on Pluto is still a planet, just a dwarf one
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
I like to imagine the alternative world, where instead of deplanetizing Pluto, they planetized all the dwarf planets and planetoids in our system.
If that happened, then school children would no longer be required to learn the names of all of the planets. That’s just a practical concern with adding another several dozen planets to the list.
And I think it is worthwhile to make kids learn the names and some basic facts about the 8 planets we have.
Did you ever have to memorize the periodic table? This would be a walk in the park by comparison, at least using the current dwarf planet definition.
It’s a grade school vs high school thing though. Also only our AP chem class has to memorize the entire table. Knowing the first 20-40 was sufficient for everyone else.
Probably a teacher-specific things too. I passed AP chem and didn’t have to memorize it.
How many could there be?
Officially only 4 trans-Neptunian objects have been recognized as dwarf planets. But here’s a paper that proposes another 36 known objects to be dwarf planets.
That’s about what the situation was in 2006 as well. A new technology was worked out to make it easier to find these, and once it did a bunch of discoveries came in really fast. The writing was definitely on the wall.
If you include the entire Oort cloud, there could be billions of objects out there.
I thought dwarf planets still had to be round, and they just lack the “cleared its orbit” requirement (e.g. Ceres in the asteroid belt). That would disqualify any Oort cloud objects except Pluto and Charon as far as I know.
I think that’s so cool!
I wonder what they’re like (I’m sure the answer is cold and rocky, but still!)
We need more deities!
The Earth’s Moon is about 1.5 times bigger than Pluto.
The earth’s moon is an extreme outlier to our knowledge. Thea made our world weird
Is it an outlier because the moon is a pretty big satellite for such a snall planet?
And the 2006 decimation of planet that made Pluto not a planet explicitly added “must not orbit another object” to stop the moon from being a planet.
And Titan is 6% bigger than Mercury.
in Asimov’s Foundation series, there is (was) a galaxy-spanning human civilization, but Earth was lost and mostly considered mythical. One of the arguments against it actually existing was the absurdity of such a double planet system existing. In the wider galaxy only giant planets had such large satellites.
In his books were they similarly absurdly tiny, rotating in irregular orbits well outside of their class of planets, and inhabiting an entire solar system of similarly sized unremarkable objects?
in fact, there are only glowing stars and non-glowing stars :)