Pluto not a planet? :[?

Question

i know its old news but what do you think about Pluto not being a planet? i'm watching something on TV about it.

i vote Pluto is a planet. just a midget one :]

Answer 1

Science gets to decide, not emotion.  Scientists have decided it was not formed from the same processes as planets, so it is not one, end of story.

Does it really matter to anyone's life what label Pluto has?

Answer 2

Pluto is not a planet - deal with it.

It is a Dwarf planet and a Kuiper Belt Object.

The International Astronomical Union defined a planet in 2006. Prior to then, we did not have a definition for planets. The planets out to Saturn are visible without a telescope, so have always been known. Consequently we didn’t have a definition for a planet before!

Ceres, the largest asteroid and the first to be discovered was originally classified as a planet, and kept this status until we discovered that it was just the largest of a class of objects we now call asteroids.

Pluto was only discovered in 1930 and it is now clear that it is actually the largest of a class of objects we now call Kuiper Belt Objects.

Consequently we now have a new class of objects called Dwarf Planets, which included Pluto and Ceres, but should also include Eris, Quaoar, and Sedna as well as several objects that are currently unnamed (they have numbers) and maybe a couple of other asteroids.

If you want to keep Pluto as a planet, you need to promote Ceres back to planet status, and you need to promote the other Dwarf Planets - necessitating textbook re-writes anyway.

Since the Kuiper belt is where many comets from, we might class Pluto as a proto-comet.

You can download my powerpoint presentation from: http://stardust.astro.missouri.edu/FTP/

the file is called: Pluto_talk.ppt

(original – huh?)

Now- to the people who say things like "My teacher told me so" or "we have to re-write the textbooks". These are ridiculous arguments.

Science is a dynamic field and our understanding of the physical universe is changing all the time.

Science books do get updated fairly regularly, and even then they are out of date within a couple of years!

Teachers (even Professors) are not always correct.

When I was a kid (before the Voyagers) Jupiter had 13 moons; shortly thereafter we found some more, so by the time I went to college it had 16 moons. Now we know it has close to 60!. Should we deny the existence of these moons in order to make "what my teacher taught me" and my old textbooks correct?

Answer 3

"i vote Pluto is a planet. just a midget one :]"

That's exactly what they did (except they use the word "dwarf").

Neptune's orbit looked a bit off when they measured it over a century ago.  They thought that the perturbations were caused by another planet out there somewhere (this is how they had found Neptune:  by measuring the perturbations on the orbits of the other outer planets).

When they found Pluto, they were sure they had found the culprit.  However, with time, we have found that Pluto is waaaay too small to have perturbed any orbit.  It is 6 times SMALLER than our Moon, in mass.

Also, we are finding more and more objects, similar to Pluto, on orbits very close to Pluto's orbit.  It looks like it could be the first objects we see of another belt of objects (like the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter).

Instead of ending up with a thousand new planets (imagine trying to learn all their names), it was decided to create a new class of dwarf planets.  The same thing happened in the late 1850s with the creation of the class of minor planets (asteroids).

Answer 4

The pluto was a planet since 1930.In 2006,it was downgraded into Dwarf palnet.In 2008,it was classified as Plutoid by International astronomical union

Now Eris and Plutoare the two objects in the new classification

Answer 5

no its just an astroid or meteor, or a piece of space junk

Answer 6

call it a Dwarf Planet and everyone is happy.

thats what it is.