diverging

@diverging@lemmy.ml

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Not according to the IAU.

  According to the IAU, “planets and dwarf planets are two distinct classes of objects” – in other words, “dwarf planets” are not planets.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨You are in this solar system, but we do not grant you the rank of planet⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Ceres was considered a planet in the first half of the 1800’s, along with a bunch of things in the asteroid belt. There was a point where there were 64 planets.

  In the present state of knowledge astronomers give us the following list:
  Sixty-four “primary planets” revolving round the Sun as our Earth does.
  Twenty satellites, including our Moon.
  Of the sixty-four primary planets fifty-six are asteroids, comparatively small bodies, all of which were discovered in this century, and fifty-two since the year 1844.]

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨pluto⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  No. I copied and pasted that. The definition says ‘the Sun’. There was a proposal to classify ‘exoplanets’ but the IAU never accepted it, and so those large masses orbiting other stars remain undefined.

  Exoplanets are addressed in a 2003 position statement issued by a now-defunct IAU Working Group on Extrasolar Planets. However, this position statement was never proposed as an official IAU resolution and was never voted on by IAU members.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨pluto⁩ ⁨⁨7⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  The stupidest consequence of the definition is not the classification of Pluto, but that there are only eight planets in the entire universe.

  a planet is a celestial body that:

  1. is in orbit around the Sun