Pluto is a Giant Comet

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
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I think I am finally just going to stand my ground on this one and go with Jerry. Pluto is a planet. However, not everyone is with Jerry on this. Southwest Research Institute is suggesting that Pluto is nothing more than a comet. Jerry and I aren't buying this.


“We’ve developed what we call ‘the giant comet’ cosmochemical model of Pluto formation,” said Dr. Christopher Glein of SwRI’s Space Science and Engineering Division. The research is described in a paper published online today in Icarus. At the heart of the research is the nitrogen-rich ice in Sputnik Planitia, a large glacier that forms the left lobe of the bright Tombaugh Regio feature on Pluto’s surface. “We found an intriguing consistency between the estimated amount of nitrogen inside the glacier and the amount that would be expected if Pluto was formed by the agglomeration of roughly a billion comets or other Kuiper Belt objects similar in chemical composition to 67P, the comet explored by Rosetta.”
 
Pluto wasn't officially a planet for a few years and wasn't considered part of the Milky Way galaxy. This guy wants to think he's smart and is reaching deep for answers.
 
Thought he was a cartoon character.

Or was that bluto ?

The fat dude in popeye.

Wats his nom
 
pluto.gif
 
Asteroids were originally considered planets. Once they discovered 30 or so and found they were all in between Mars and Jupiter they renamed them asteroids, though planet and asteroid were used interchangeably for some time. Now we have something similar with plutoids and various other trans-Neptunian and Kuiper belt objects.

Pluto has less mass than the Moon and it's orbit is highly inclined/crosses Neptune. You can still call it a planet if you want, it's designated as a 'minor planet.'

Now they think maybe there are even more large (Earth or even Jupiter sized) planets way out there. There's no need to get caught up on grief over Pluto.
 
I thought Pluto is classified as a Dwarf planet, much like the many other planetoids out there beyond the gas giants that have weird orbits that don't follow the orbital plane. "Sedna" and "Eris" come to mind that are lumped in the same distinction.
 
Pluto might become a planet. Don't hold your breath though. Half a billion years maybe as it accretes material from the Kuiper belt and it's orbit stabilizes. Could have originated as an extra solar system object and developed a regular orbit.
 
Has been a "planet" since 1930, reclassified in 2006 in a questionable vote, and is a Plutoid in the dwarf planet category.

Calling it a dwarf planet is what made them give up on having it reclassified.

Personally, it has moons and is a planet to me. Accretion will prove me right in the long run.

Lol
 
I was wondering who Jerry is. It would be nice to add some context to obscure references.
 
Dan_D said:
Personally, I think the IAU's established criteria that downgraded Pluto is nonsense.
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It was a necessary evil, otherwise we'd have Ceres in the main asteroid belt, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and hundreds of more potential planets.
 
sfsuphysics said:
It was a necessary evil, otherwise we'd have Ceres in the main asteroid belt, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and hundreds of more potential planets.
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"My Very Educated Mother Cannot Just Serve Us Nine Pizzas. Hundreds May Eat."

Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Ceres
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto.
Haumea
Make-Make
Eris

(And it gets stupid-crazy when the hundreds actually sit down at the table...)
 
sfsuphysics said:
It was a necessary evil, otherwise we'd have Ceres in the main asteroid belt, Eris, Haumea, Makemake, and hundreds of more potential planets.
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Not necessarily. We could have established other criteria to "sort" these objects if need be.
 
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Pluto was thought to be a planet because it happened to be the first Kuiper belt object found. Had we knew at that time that this Kuiper belt existed, I'm pretty sure Pluto would not have been classified as a planet, or even being seen as a unique object in this belt of icy bodies.

This is merely updating our knowledge with new discovery, I see no reason to religiously insist it is still a planet.
 
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I disliked them changing Pluto at first, but honestly the reasoning is fairly sound. There are even larger objects in that belt than Pluto... If we are going to name them all planets shit could get interesting. So far, the most common answer why Pluto should continue to be a full fledged planet is because "that is the way it has been for a long time.."
 
Pluto a comet? Aye and if my grandmother had wheels shed be a wagaon...

KarsusTG said:
I disliked them changing Pluto at first, but honestly the reasoning is fairly sound. There are even larger objects in that belt than Pluto... If we are going to name them all planets shit could get interesting. So far, the most common answer why Pluto should continue to be a full fledged planet is because "that is the way it has been for a long time.."
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Pluto should be grandfathered in.
 
jhymesba said:
"My Very Educated Mother Cannot Just Serve Us Nine Pizzas. Hundreds May Eat."

Mercury
Venus
Earth
Mars
Ceres
Jupiter
Saturn
Uranus
Neptune
Pluto.
Haumea
Make-Make
Eris

(And it gets stupid-crazy when the hundreds actually sit down at the table...)
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Pretty much this.

It was called a planet, because before 1930, some folks made math mistakes that predicted a "Planet IX" at about the spot they found Pluto a few years later.

Then, a few years after that, someone else realized the math mistakes, but left it alone because there wasn't anything else out there, so why not.

With the discovery of Sedna, Eris, Haumea, Makemake and a 1/2 dozen more that we know of now, it was realized that there were a LOT of "pluto's" out there.
Unless you want to call them all planets, there is no way to draw a line that keeps Pluto a planet, and not Makemake or Eris one also.

So, just as happened with the Asteroids in the Belt, they were reclassified from planet to something else.
In the case of the asteroids, this happened before 'normal' people started getting taught much about the planets, so nobody really cared, it was just a naming/logistics thing.
Now it's "They're taking away my childhood", or whatever.

There are some reasonable arguments to be made about the IAU classification scheme, and where they draw the lines, but there are going to be reasonable arguments with any naming convention.
 
Zumino Zufeilon said:
Pretty much this.

There are some reasonable arguments to be made about the IAU classification scheme, and where they draw the lines, but there are going to be reasonable arguments with any naming convention.
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One easy idea would be to simply use Pluto as the line; anything the size of Pluto or larger gets to be a planet, anything smaller gets shuffled into some other category. Of course, then we have to decide if we are measuring by mass or by volume; Eris for example is 27% more massive than Pluto, but slightly smaller by diameter.
 
There are currently over 300 known objects that either fit or may possibly fit the same criteria, dwarf planet, right now. If you want Pluto to be a planet then you have to allow the rest of them in too. There's no such thing as "grandfather clause" in science.

For people worried about the ninth planet, be more interested in a possible real planet nine.

dreadcthulhu said:
One easy idea would be to simply use Pluto as the line; anything the size of Pluto or larger gets to be a planet, anything smaller gets shuffled into some other category. Of course, then we have to decide if we are measuring by mass or by volume; Eris for example is 27% more massive than Pluto, but slightly smaller by diameter.
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That's just making up arbitrary bull shit.
 
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dreadcthulhu said:
One easy idea would be to simply use Pluto as the line; anything the size of Pluto or larger gets to be a planet, anything smaller gets shuffled into some other category. Of course, then we have to decide if we are measuring by mass or by volume; Eris for example is 27% more massive than Pluto, but slightly smaller by diameter.
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or my penis
 
bigdogchris said:
There are currently over 300 known objects that either fit or may possibly fit the same criteria, dwarf planet, right now. If you want Pluto to be a planet then you have to allow the rest of them in too. There's no such thing as "grandfather clause" in science.

For people worried about the ninth planet, be more interested in a possible real planet nine.

That's just making up arbitrary bull shit.
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Oh please, we arent talking about "laws" of physics or chemical interactions here. We are talking about a man made arbitrary definition of a celestial body. There certainly can be exceptions made to the standard. The universe wont implode if we call Pluto a planet.
 
dreadcthulhu said:
One easy idea would be to simply use Pluto as the line; anything the size of Pluto or larger gets to be a planet, anything smaller gets shuffled into some other category. Of course, then we have to decide if we are measuring by mass or by volume; Eris for example is 27% more massive than Pluto, but slightly smaller by diameter.
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So, you're cool with the Moon being a planet then?

By both Mass and Volume the Moon is a good deal larger than Pluto. The Moon does not "exactly" orbit the Earth, rather they both orbit a point that is just inside the Earth (meaning the pair orbit a Point that is not actually near the center of the earth)

That was one of the discussions that lead to "dwarf planet" category, as a way to encapsulate all the "grey-ness" in a single bucket.
 
KarsusTG said:
I disliked them changing Pluto at first, but honestly the reasoning is fairly sound. There are even larger objects in that belt than Pluto... If we are going to name them all planets shit could get interesting. So far, the most common answer why Pluto should continue to be a full fledged planet is because "that is the way it has been for a long time.."
Click to expand...

Name one object in the belt larger than Pluto. Eris was originally thought to be larger, but was determined to be slightly smaller when the probe actually made it out that far. It's believed that Eris has greater mass than Pluto, but it isn't larger. Even by the old estimates of Eris's size, it was the one thing larger than Pluto out there we know of. All the other "Dwarf Planets" that we know of are smaller than Pluto. Some of them do come relatively close to Pluto's size but nothing out there is larger than Pluto as far as we know today. I would agree that this could change and we have determined there is a lot of potential objects out there.

What difference does it make if we are a 9 planet system or a 38 planet system? I don't mind having set criteria for planets which changes the status of some of these objects but the reason chosen in this case is stupid. Here is the reason for the disagreement taken from Wikipedia:

"Stern, currently leading NASA's New Horizons mission, disagrees with the reclassification of Pluto on the basis of its inability to clear a neighbourhood. One of his arguments is that the IAU's wording is vague, and that—like Pluto—Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune have not cleared their orbital neighbourhoods either. Earth co-orbits with 10,000 near-Earth asteroids (NEAs), and Jupiter has 100,000 trojans in its orbital path. "If Neptune had cleared its zone, Pluto wouldn't be there", he has said."

By that reasoning we are living on a Dwarf Planet and Jupiter would need to be reclassified as well. That simply doesn't make sense. There is nothing gained by the reclassification. Nothing is really implied by the term dwarf planet other than the planets' size. If the IAU had decided that a planet had to be round, in direct orbit of the sun, and exceed a certain size threshold, I think that would be fine.
 
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