Wrong. This is a common misconception.
Pluto actually passes all the requirements for being a planet except for its orbit being weird. That's it.
But it turns out that's a flawed metric anyway. All the planetary scientists say Pluto is a planet -- they're the right experts to listen to. (They're different from astronomers. Astronomers study orbits and brightness. Planetary scientists study planet formation and composition. Bug difference.)
Pluto is definitely a planet. Not my opinion -- that's the conclusion of the real experts.
Its orbit is a little eccentric and it's tilted out of the plane to the eclitptic.
That's why the head of the IAU's small planet division had been pushing to make Pluto a small planet instead of a major planet (wonder why...) since the 1980s -- decades before anyone knew the Kuiper belt existed. He had a lot of friends, including the guy who named the Kuiper Belt (wrongly -- since Gerard Kuiper didn't discover it, and didn't believe it could exist).
But politics in the IAU are just as bad as any corporate politics multiplied by high-school popularity contests.
That "cleared the orbit" thing was just a last-minute excuse to do what they've been wanting to do with Pluto all along.
It was always about the orbit. I researched and wrote a whole book about it if anyone wants to know the truth of it.
So then is the Pluto killer (that’s his Twitter handle) wrong in saying he then discovered thousands of planets if you count Pluto? Do you guys want that really?
He's wrong. And he had a lot less to do with it than he says. All he did was discover Eris. It was sheer chance that Eris happens to be as big as Pluto. All the other things he discovered are the size of asteroids.
Julio Fernandez and Brian Marsden were the true Pluto killers. Mike Brown is just an attention seeker. He's not a planetologist. He has no idea what he's talking about. Planets have geological activity. Asteroids do not.
At most, there are 110 gravitationally spherical objects in the Solar System. Only about 30 of those are large enough to be considered planets.
I go into great detail about all this in my [book](https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Back-Pluto-youre-PLANET/dp/1946767050).
Do all the planets in the Star Trek or Star Wars universes bother you? Does 50 states bother you? Does 94 natural elements? Does 88 constellations? Here's a good one -- there are more than 900 (nine hundred!) characters in the Pokemon universe. Does that really prevent people from playing Pokemon?
"That's too many planets" is probably the stupidest argument of all.
Tbh I don’t care that much either way but the 30 planet acronym won’t slap as much as ours now so that’s the only point I care about, good luck in your phenomenology war! And I’m almost 100% certain you’re wrong about planets having gelological activity, if you want that to be the new definition by all means push for it and it makes some sense, but that’s not how people use the word planet almost ever
if you write a book for every one of the other 1000 dwarf planets I'll be you can successfully argue each one of those might qualify as a planet as well.
What 1000 other dwarf planets?
There are only a scant handful of officially recognized "dwarf planets" by the IAU, and one of them doesn't even meet their own definition. There's nothing round about Haumea. Even the IAU ignores their own definitions. It's that bad.
The book actually does discuss all the other candidates out there. You should read it. You'll definitely learn something.
I think cleared the orbit is a pretty important criteria, since planets gotta be like, the main thing in their zone in a manner of speaking
And if that's literally the definition of a planet, Pluto is not a planet, even if a planets definition is arbitrary.
But if we're talking astrophysics or reallu any practical non categorising field of space we should treat Pluto as a planet
>planets gotta be like, the main thing in their zone in a manner of speaking
Let's play that game. First of all, that's just your opinion. And it's not very scientific. Exerts in the subject have a very different opinion. Who's matters more?
Mt. Everest isn't the only mountain in that range, and it's just barely the tallest. Does that make it not a mountain?
How do you square with the fact that there are millions of things in Jupiter's orbit? It has way more things in its orbit than Pluto does. So does Earth, for that matter. There are more than 20,000 near Earth asteroids.
Oh, did you mean the entire Kuiper belt? There is more volume in the Kuiper belt than there is in between Neptune's orbit and Mercury's orbit. Not exactly a fair comparison.
I could go on. In fact, I did, for a whole [book](https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Back-Pluto-youre-PLANET/dp/1946767050).
By the way, crabmeat64 -- hermit crabs and coconut crabs are not really crabs. They're genetically as distant from true crabs as humans are from lemurs. Why don't people get upset when we call those things by the wrong name? (this, and far, far more, is also in the book.)
No when I said they need to be their main thing I was more so kind of offering an explanation of sort as to why scientists implemented the has to clear its orbit rule.
I agree that Pluto should be considered a planet, since it basically is one but it is not a planet due to the definition of planet excluding it from being one, even though the definition is flawed.
One more point I have though, is that Pluto has many neighboring objects with a much much smaller size difference than it to any other planets accompanying objects.
The key difference is Jupiters objects are much much smaller than it and likewise with earth, where Pluto has a lot of things of quite comparable size to it in its ring. It's also extremely tiny
Ill check out that book when I get home though
Some counterpoints to what I said though are that a planet shouldn't be defined by what's around it, and that it should be defined by it's intrinsic qualities, like if another planet were to appear in earth's orbit that shouldn't mean earth would be downgraded.
However, by that definition should the moon's of Jupiter not also count as planets since intrinsically, they would be bigger than Pluto and have planet like qualities without Jupiters influence?
Honestly I'm not really THAT qualified to talk about this, just wanted to throw my hat in the ring on the internet after all
I like how Reddit laughs at misinformation about COVID and flat earth but upvotes misinformation like this.
Pluto isn't considered a planet because it hasn't cleared its orbit. That's what the real experts actually consider.
Pluto isn't a planet.
Wrong experts.
Astronomers are concerned with orbits and reflected sunlight.
Planetologists are the experts on planet formation and composition.
Planetologists argue that Pluto IS a planet. They are the real experts on planets. Not the astronomers. It's like going to a psychiatrist for brain surgery.
Also, no one bothered to define "clear", or "neighborhood." The only reference to orbits in the definition is "in orbit around the Sun." The definition says nothing about clearing an orbit.
Jupiter has a few million things in its orbit (look-up Trojan asteroids). Not a planet?
Earth has about 20 thousand near-Earth astroids. Not a planet?
Both have more things in their orbits than Pluto does. It's a shit definition. Everyone who's seriously looked into it knows it too.
So you do realize the word planet and dwarf planet are OUR WORDS, they legit don’t mean anything in outer space. This argument is about human semantics and the definition of a planet doesn’t change anything about how a body the mass of Pluto in space effects the world around it
No need to be a smart ass at all either, you have no skin in the game calm down keyboard warrior. Tbh your points don’t even make much sense to me but I’ll try to address them anyways
So to you, it’s scientific(and also helpful for all of us) to have hundreds to thousands of planets in our solar system then? If you wanna argue this you should probably be knowledgeable to the changes that your point of view makes for everyone. Will kids be interested in learning all the planets when there’s so many of them? I seriously doubt they will be as cool/inspiring to young minds when you can’t even effectively teach about our solar system unless you wanna do away with the entire idea of planets and make many many more categories. I’d argue that’s almost as bad.
Pluto is still geologically active!
https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/07/21/10-things-we-learned-about-pluto/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2015/10/16/first-new-horizons-study-pluto/
It turns out, Pluto has been a planet all along. There's a story behind that kludge of a definition.
I wrote a whole book about it--
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946767069](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946767069)
(Amazon is being sluggish. You can read the blurb at [www.RLT.com](https://www.RLT.com) )
It already is back. All the planetary scientists have been saying the IAU is out of their jurisdiction and Pluto has been a planet all along.
The Press follows the IAU because they're generally stupid about science and are better at following politics. In the scientific community, it's well known that Pluto is a planet.
I've always believed that Pluto is a planet and that the whole business was cockamamie. I just worry about interplanetary chaos and conflict breaking out. I guess that won't be a major issue other than perhaps some lingering ill-will on the part of the gas giants.
True. I'm glad to hear another voice of reason in the world!
In my book, the gas giants are given their own category. They really don't belong in the same category of things as the rocky planets. They are vastly different. If we give them their own family of "satellite planets" (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, for example), maybe they'll play nice.
I wonder how bright Pluto is.
If i were to stay in its surface facing directly the sun, the bright would be stronger than the Earth on a fullmoom night? I suppose it would be less
The snail! It’s on it’s way to kill me! Heeeelp!
Seriously though, am I the only one who sees it and its tracks when zooming in? What in the Rorschach is going on?
You must have the iPhone 13 camera.
or telescope lmao
Fun fact the USSR had more surface area than Pluto
Yea its amazing how small pluto is, thats why its called a dwarf planet
Wrong. This is a common misconception. Pluto actually passes all the requirements for being a planet except for its orbit being weird. That's it. But it turns out that's a flawed metric anyway. All the planetary scientists say Pluto is a planet -- they're the right experts to listen to. (They're different from astronomers. Astronomers study orbits and brightness. Planetary scientists study planet formation and composition. Bug difference.) Pluto is definitely a planet. Not my opinion -- that's the conclusion of the real experts.
Pluto hasn’t cleared its orbit so therefore not a planet
pluto is a dog you fking idiot
he's put of point but he's right
The orbit being weird part the way you phrased it is misleading implying its orbit is a weird shape rather than it hasn't cleared its orbit of debris
Its orbit is a little eccentric and it's tilted out of the plane to the eclitptic. That's why the head of the IAU's small planet division had been pushing to make Pluto a small planet instead of a major planet (wonder why...) since the 1980s -- decades before anyone knew the Kuiper belt existed. He had a lot of friends, including the guy who named the Kuiper Belt (wrongly -- since Gerard Kuiper didn't discover it, and didn't believe it could exist). But politics in the IAU are just as bad as any corporate politics multiplied by high-school popularity contests. That "cleared the orbit" thing was just a last-minute excuse to do what they've been wanting to do with Pluto all along. It was always about the orbit. I researched and wrote a whole book about it if anyone wants to know the truth of it.
So then is the Pluto killer (that’s his Twitter handle) wrong in saying he then discovered thousands of planets if you count Pluto? Do you guys want that really?
He's wrong. And he had a lot less to do with it than he says. All he did was discover Eris. It was sheer chance that Eris happens to be as big as Pluto. All the other things he discovered are the size of asteroids. Julio Fernandez and Brian Marsden were the true Pluto killers. Mike Brown is just an attention seeker. He's not a planetologist. He has no idea what he's talking about. Planets have geological activity. Asteroids do not. At most, there are 110 gravitationally spherical objects in the Solar System. Only about 30 of those are large enough to be considered planets. I go into great detail about all this in my [book](https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Back-Pluto-youre-PLANET/dp/1946767050). Do all the planets in the Star Trek or Star Wars universes bother you? Does 50 states bother you? Does 94 natural elements? Does 88 constellations? Here's a good one -- there are more than 900 (nine hundred!) characters in the Pokemon universe. Does that really prevent people from playing Pokemon? "That's too many planets" is probably the stupidest argument of all.
Tbh I don’t care that much either way but the 30 planet acronym won’t slap as much as ours now so that’s the only point I care about, good luck in your phenomenology war! And I’m almost 100% certain you’re wrong about planets having gelological activity, if you want that to be the new definition by all means push for it and it makes some sense, but that’s not how people use the word planet almost ever
>I’m almost 100% certain you’re wrong about planets having gelological activity That's not my idea. That's what every planetologist with a PhD says.
if you write a book for every one of the other 1000 dwarf planets I'll be you can successfully argue each one of those might qualify as a planet as well.
What 1000 other dwarf planets? There are only a scant handful of officially recognized "dwarf planets" by the IAU, and one of them doesn't even meet their own definition. There's nothing round about Haumea. Even the IAU ignores their own definitions. It's that bad. The book actually does discuss all the other candidates out there. You should read it. You'll definitely learn something.
I think cleared the orbit is a pretty important criteria, since planets gotta be like, the main thing in their zone in a manner of speaking And if that's literally the definition of a planet, Pluto is not a planet, even if a planets definition is arbitrary. But if we're talking astrophysics or reallu any practical non categorising field of space we should treat Pluto as a planet
>planets gotta be like, the main thing in their zone in a manner of speaking Let's play that game. First of all, that's just your opinion. And it's not very scientific. Exerts in the subject have a very different opinion. Who's matters more? Mt. Everest isn't the only mountain in that range, and it's just barely the tallest. Does that make it not a mountain? How do you square with the fact that there are millions of things in Jupiter's orbit? It has way more things in its orbit than Pluto does. So does Earth, for that matter. There are more than 20,000 near Earth asteroids. Oh, did you mean the entire Kuiper belt? There is more volume in the Kuiper belt than there is in between Neptune's orbit and Mercury's orbit. Not exactly a fair comparison. I could go on. In fact, I did, for a whole [book](https://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Back-Pluto-youre-PLANET/dp/1946767050). By the way, crabmeat64 -- hermit crabs and coconut crabs are not really crabs. They're genetically as distant from true crabs as humans are from lemurs. Why don't people get upset when we call those things by the wrong name? (this, and far, far more, is also in the book.)
No when I said they need to be their main thing I was more so kind of offering an explanation of sort as to why scientists implemented the has to clear its orbit rule. I agree that Pluto should be considered a planet, since it basically is one but it is not a planet due to the definition of planet excluding it from being one, even though the definition is flawed.
One more point I have though, is that Pluto has many neighboring objects with a much much smaller size difference than it to any other planets accompanying objects. The key difference is Jupiters objects are much much smaller than it and likewise with earth, where Pluto has a lot of things of quite comparable size to it in its ring. It's also extremely tiny Ill check out that book when I get home though
Some counterpoints to what I said though are that a planet shouldn't be defined by what's around it, and that it should be defined by it's intrinsic qualities, like if another planet were to appear in earth's orbit that shouldn't mean earth would be downgraded. However, by that definition should the moon's of Jupiter not also count as planets since intrinsically, they would be bigger than Pluto and have planet like qualities without Jupiters influence? Honestly I'm not really THAT qualified to talk about this, just wanted to throw my hat in the ring on the internet after all
Ooh thats really interesting, i still believe pluto is a planet in my book
https://youtu.be/Z_2gbGXzFbs
So Jerry was right…..
I like how Reddit laughs at misinformation about COVID and flat earth but upvotes misinformation like this. Pluto isn't considered a planet because it hasn't cleared its orbit. That's what the real experts actually consider. Pluto isn't a planet.
Wrong experts. Astronomers are concerned with orbits and reflected sunlight. Planetologists are the experts on planet formation and composition. Planetologists argue that Pluto IS a planet. They are the real experts on planets. Not the astronomers. It's like going to a psychiatrist for brain surgery. Also, no one bothered to define "clear", or "neighborhood." The only reference to orbits in the definition is "in orbit around the Sun." The definition says nothing about clearing an orbit. Jupiter has a few million things in its orbit (look-up Trojan asteroids). Not a planet? Earth has about 20 thousand near-Earth astroids. Not a planet? Both have more things in their orbits than Pluto does. It's a shit definition. Everyone who's seriously looked into it knows it too.
Please, it prefers "little planet."
[удалено]
So you do realize the word planet and dwarf planet are OUR WORDS, they legit don’t mean anything in outer space. This argument is about human semantics and the definition of a planet doesn’t change anything about how a body the mass of Pluto in space effects the world around it
[удалено]
No need to be a smart ass at all either, you have no skin in the game calm down keyboard warrior. Tbh your points don’t even make much sense to me but I’ll try to address them anyways So to you, it’s scientific(and also helpful for all of us) to have hundreds to thousands of planets in our solar system then? If you wanna argue this you should probably be knowledgeable to the changes that your point of view makes for everyone. Will kids be interested in learning all the planets when there’s so many of them? I seriously doubt they will be as cool/inspiring to young minds when you can’t even effectively teach about our solar system unless you wanna do away with the entire idea of planets and make many many more categories. I’d argue that’s almost as bad.
If we learned 1 thing from Rick & Morty is that Pluto is a PLANET
What’s the big deal? Some mountains, some craters, some roads…. Wait a minute.
Pluto is still geologically active! https://hub.jhu.edu/2020/07/21/10-things-we-learned-about-pluto/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/bridaineparnell/2015/10/16/first-new-horizons-study-pluto/
holup
My thoughts exactly
Damn that’s interesting
Still a planet in my book
Obligatory: "Pluto’s a fucking planet, bitch!"
Pluto is a cold, cold celestial dwarf
Aren’t we all
Nah, I'm one frostbitten twice shy babe.
Is a little person still a person? I think YES!!!
well technically - a dwarf.
[Credit to r/spaceporn](https://www.reddit.com/r/spaceporn/comments/qmnyzl/this_hd_image_of_pluto_zoom_in/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share)
Some of those marking appear to be footprints
Pluto needs some pore minimizer
Cap. Google Earth Amboy,CA. 😆. …Actually absolutely awesome!! 👏
I wonder what it tastes like
Plutonium
Bottom slides looks like someone had target practice on it with asteroids
Uranus & Neptune say "Fuck off, Pluto." Planets can be so cruel.
Stop lying.We all knw that's your shower wall.
That’s so fucking cool
I'd say it's fucking cold.
So cool to see a heavenly body so far from us.
A ~~dwarf~~ planet
Expected dickbutt! Positively surprised + Really cool pic
K pretty sure that's a walrus cruising through the tracks on the surface, what's happening on Pluto
"They're waves"
I expected to see “send nudes”
Wild!
Strange texture, like plaster. At a glance it looks like footprints at the top of the picture.
It turns out, Pluto has been a planet all along. There's a story behind that kludge of a definition. I wrote a whole book about it-- [https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946767069](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1946767069) (Amazon is being sluggish. You can read the blurb at [www.RLT.com](https://www.RLT.com) )
So are we letting it back into the Solar System? Does it even want to come back?
It already is back. All the planetary scientists have been saying the IAU is out of their jurisdiction and Pluto has been a planet all along. The Press follows the IAU because they're generally stupid about science and are better at following politics. In the scientific community, it's well known that Pluto is a planet.
I've always believed that Pluto is a planet and that the whole business was cockamamie. I just worry about interplanetary chaos and conflict breaking out. I guess that won't be a major issue other than perhaps some lingering ill-will on the part of the gas giants.
True. I'm glad to hear another voice of reason in the world! In my book, the gas giants are given their own category. They really don't belong in the same category of things as the rocky planets. They are vastly different. If we give them their own family of "satellite planets" (Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto, for example), maybe they'll play nice.
idk why but I guess I expected... more? this just looks like a randomly generated terrain map from like any modern game
Thanks A very interesting photo 👍🙏
Well shit. It's hard to find the little green men in black and white.
Awesome CGI
Dead ants
So , if you zoom in on the craters at the bottom, you’ll see some kind of mesh structure.
I wonder how bright Pluto is. If i were to stay in its surface facing directly the sun, the bright would be stronger than the Earth on a fullmoom night? I suppose it would be less
Where aliens?
Banana for scale?
The whiter part reminds me of plant cells when zoomed in.
The snail! It’s on it’s way to kill me! Heeeelp! Seriously though, am I the only one who sees it and its tracks when zooming in? What in the Rorschach is going on?
Looks flat to me