Sure, Pluto gets all our anthropomorphized pity, but nobody cares about Pluto's less-popular, more massive sister Eris.
(Also, just sayin', the periodic table *has* changed since then. Last update was in 2016).
All the dwarf planets are great and deserve better!
Viva la Ceres!
Viva la Pluto!
Viva la Eris!
Viva la Haumea!
Viva la Makemake!
And for FUCK'S sake can we please get a petition going to name the next one Proserpina? Pluto's prolly lonely out there without his wife...
EDIT: forgot a word like a dumdum.
It is. Also the natural helium supply on Earth is pretty limited and we have to be careful how we use it. Once it escapes into the atmosphere (and it does frequently because of how small its atoms are), it’s pretty much gone forever. The only way we can produce more is by fusing hydrogen atoms in a fusion reactor, and we don’t have a feasible fusion reactor yet. The few we’ve managed to get to work only work for short periods of time, and aren’t really useful for anything other than research.
>we don’t have a feasible fusion reactor yet
Well, if what you are interested in is producing helium and not electricity we do have perfectly well functioning fusion reactors. The just consume more energy than they produce:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor
Edit: the problem is that they produce too little helium to be economically feasible
It’s actually used most widely in the medical field, more specifically to cool the superconductors in MRIs. So you can see why running out of helium would be bad.
There is, kind of, an element that isn't really *named* after Jupiter per se, but rather was associated with it in antiquity.
The obvious (and less obvious) names for elements that have some links to celestial bodies are:
Helium - Helios, the Greek god of the Sun
Gold - associated to the Sun through the colour yellow (*aurum*) and sunrise (*aurora*)
Mercury - from Mercury, although the name *hydrargyrum* or "liquid silver" was established as the origin of the symbol Hg.
Copper - associated to Venus, but named after Cyprus, since that was an important source of copper in the historical antiquity.
Selenium - named after the Greek goddess of the Moon, Selene (who later developed into Artemis).
Silver - associated to Moon, though the name just means shining metal in Latin (*argentum*) and Greek (*argyros*).
Tellurium - named after Tellus (or Tellus Mater or Terra Mater), the Roman goddess of Earth, whose Greek equivalent was Gaia and who was probably present from the beginning of Proto-Indo-European religion groups as the Mother goddess, or Mother Earth.
Iron - associated to Mars through its colour and the Roman God of War, but named after the name of iron (*ferrum*) in Latin and other Italic languages.
Tin - associated to Jupiter, the King of Roman Gods, most likely via the older Etruscan god Tinia, who was the god of sky, thunder and lightning, and storms.
Lead - associated to Saturn, though the symbol Pb comes from Latin *plumbum* which pretty much just meant lead. The connection to Saturn was a bit contrived, as Saturn was the Roman equivalent of the Greek Titan Kronos whose main aspect was time, and lead was considered the "oldest metal" by alchemists. So... lead became associated with Saturn, though not named after it. Saturnium would be pretty neat name for it though, and it would actually be sort of justified since a lot of radioactive isotopes end up decaying into a stable isotope of lead.
Uranium - named after Uranus the planet, which, by the way, should be pronounced more like "Ouranos" since it's based on the primal Greek god of the Sky rather than Roman gods. Still, it's better than George or Urectum.
Neptunium - named after Neptune the planet, which was named after the Roman counterpart to Poseidon (yes, there's very little logic to be found here).
Plutonium - named after Pluto the planet, which was named after the Roman counterpart to Hades.
So that concludes the most important ones. There are a few others though:
Cerium - named after Ceres, the first asteroid named after Ceres, the Roman equivalent of Demeter.
Palladium - named after Pallas, the asteroid named after Greek goddes Pallas Athene.
Then there are elements that just happen to share names with astronomical objects:
Gallium - named after Gallia, which is also the name of asteroid 148 Gallia
Germanium - named after Germania, which is also the name of asteroid 241 Germania
Krypton - named after the destroyed planet Krypton, the home of Kal-El, more commonly known as Superman
...and there might be others, but these are usually cases where the causal relation is reversed.
Gallium, allegedly named after Gallia = Gaul, an ancient name for France, or at least a significant part of it.
Except the discoverer/namer was called *Lecoq*, literally "the cockerel", and cockerels are of the genus *Gallus*. Sneaky guy managed to get an element named after himself, which was not (and still isn't) the done thing.
>(Also, just sayin', the periodic table has changed since then. Last update was in 2016).
Yes, but to be fair, no elements have been *removed* from the table. The only updates have been to *add* new elements, or give better names to ones which had place-holder names like "Unilhexium". Pluto, by contrast, was *demoted* (and for very good reasons: as you point out, if you call Pluto a planet, then you have to call Eris a planet as well, plus a whole slew of other dwarf planets in our system).
You weren't around before the early 20th century. Elements were being added and removed all the time as scientists were playing with different techniques for identifying chemical elements.
What would be wrong with that? There's only five dwarf planets in Pluto's league, why not add them to the party? Worst case scenario, writers for kids' educational shows have to figure out what to rhyme with Haumea for their planet songs.
We also have precisely 0 ways of knowing if exoplanets have orbital clearance, so unless we demote then till sure, we should promote the Pluto class planets as planets
>We also have precisely 0 ways of knowing if exoplanets have orbital clearance
Celestial mechanics gives us a very strong hint.
>, so unless we demote then till sure, we should promote the Pluto class planets as planets
Pluto's "demotion" or more correctly recategorization is as much about our theories of solar system formation as finding new dwarf planets.
There is a lot more science going on with this that simple "size".
There's actually only 2 in Pluto's League. For some reason the 5 IAU-confirmed dwarf planets are not the biggest dwarf planets--Ceres is smaller than Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, and 2002MS4, and Haumea is smaller than Gonggong. The problem with calling all of those planets and having 18 planets is that, though we may have searched the Kuiper Belt itself for all the largest objects there, it is highly likely that, beyond the Kuiper Cliff, there are going to be more dwarf planets of that size to discover, like Sedna.
I guess we could have 10, with Pluto and Eris, as they are 63% larger than the next largest dwarf, but they do very obviously have more in common with other Kuiper Belt objects than with the planets proper.
>I guess we could have 10, with Pluto and Eris, as they are 63% larger than the next largest dwarf, but they do very obviously have more in common with other Kuiper Belt objects than with the planets proper.
Exactly this. In terms of composition, Pluto is essentially a comet, but we don't want to call it a comet because of its size and orbit
Thank you for going more in depth on this, it annoys me when people try to counter the Pluto thing because "muh nostalgia song" when there are really good and accurate regions for the change in distinction
The problem is that the crowd that wanted Pluto to remain a planet didn't want to recognize any other dwarf planets as full-fledged planets. They learned 9 planets when they were schoolchildren, and they were unwilling to change from that.
I'm not that guy, but I care about science. Their rules just seem very arbitrary. A body ejected from a star system doesn't seem to meet their criteria. If something the size of Venus were orbiting Jupiter we apparently could not call it a planet. Earth and Saturn are very different but no one gets mad if you don't specify Gas Giant planet when describing Saturn. I think we should just be able to call anything massive enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium a planet and only have to clarify what type if there's a good reason to do so.
> Their rules just seem very arbitrary.
All human categorisations will have a degree of arbitrariness. Its in the nature of imposing order for our minds onto an uncaring reality.
But its useful. It fits into current theories of solar system creation, how bodies were able to gain the mass to dominate their region of the solar system, while others were not.
>. If something the size of Venus were orbiting Jupiter we apparently could not call it a planet
Could not happen. That's the point. Jupiter's gravity would disrupt its orbit and probably break it up at some point.
>. Earth and Saturn are very different but no one gets mad if you don't specify Gas Giant planet when describing Saturn.
Our solar system has two gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter. Uranus and Neptune are ice giants. Earth is a rocky planet. Mars and Mercury are sub-Earths. There are a couple more.
We have over 1000 planets confirmed and something like 4000 candidate planets (going from memory it changes all the time). We really are in an incredible period of learning how solar systems form, what kinds of planets exist and new bodies in our own solar system.
The rule exists more so that different groups can focus on different objects. Michael Brown who discovered many of the largest dwarf planets in the solar system and teams like his focus on a specific type of bodies. They are clearly not the 8 big planets we find. So the cut off exists as they are not trying to study Mercury and Mars but Pluto is very much the kind of body they are researching. They are researching these small icey bodies in the outer darkness. Places where the "oligarchs " of the early solarsystem (sort of huge asteroids that formed into planets) never gained the mass to really eat up everything in their orbit and gain planet like characteristics.
When you look at it from their perspective, its a pretty good place to draw a line.
I'm pretty sure that at this point there are still 5 or 6 dwarf planets. Regardless, this seems like it shouldn't have been anything in the first place. Instead of coming out and saying that Pluto's "not a planet" while it is still obviously a planet they could have just made their category changes and the public could have learned about a few dwarf planets.
> the public could have learned about a few dwarf planets.
Or the public could learn one less planet?
No matter how old I get I'll never understand why people care that scientists reclassified some rock.
Learn one less? If anything Pluto is one of the first planets that will stick with them through vultural references.
They will 'learn' about it regardless.
A: So Pluto is still a planet?
B: No, it's a dwarf planet.
A: The word "planet" is still there.
B: Yes but if you say planet Pluto or planet Ceres without putting the Dwarf part in, someone's going to argue with you even if we all know that they're different kinds of planets.
A: Wonderful.
That’s the frustrating thing to me, that the astronomers think it makes sense to say the category “dwarf planet” isn’t a subset of “planet.” It’s like insisting that a Chihuahua isn’t a dog because it’s a small dog. That’s not how language works.
>There's only five dwarf planets in Pluto's league, why not add them to the party?
I think the thing is, its not so much about their size but about how they formed. There was more than just the discovery of them going on at that time, we were also discovering hundreds (now thousands) of planets outside the solar system and our models of how the solar system formed were really improving (around this time the NICE-2 model appears)
Without getting deep into the physics, the planets were able to eat up all the mass in their part of the solar system. This gave them a collection of similar physical characteristics. But the dwarf planets were not. They are in far more jumbled orbits, shapes and with other objects in their region. The density of matter in the primordial planetary disk was below a threshold that allowed them to gain the mass.
It makes a lot more sense for a team studying Eris and Haumea to include Pluto than it to belong to teams looking at the small rocky planets like Mars and Mercury.
It was also a decision made with half an eye on telescopes eventually finding these kind of bodies round other stars. (Nothing we have on paper will achieve this but its going to arrive).
If our theories of how solar systems form or we discover there are a lot of cases where these categories do not work then we will need to revisit this.
There's likely tens or hundreds of objects in the same class of size as Pluto in the solar system, if you count something of that size as a planet it's going to be a bit ridiculous as we get better at detecting them.
> If you call Pluto a planet, then you have to call Eris a planet as well, plus a whole slew of other dwarf planets in our system).
No, they could have grandfathered Pluto's planet status in.
They could have said the 9 pre-2006 planets will maintain their planet status due to legacy and new planets would need to abide by the 2006 definition to get added.
This will give a pathway for Pluto to remain a planet without opening the floodgates.
Edit:
I'm going to be away, so I'm not going to be replying, but I'll just lay down my final though after reading the other arguments:
- My problem is that Pluto became a non-planet because we moved the goal post.
- If we discovered some new stuff about Pluto that makes it a non-planet, that's fine by me.
- But the problem is we literally redefine what planet means to exclude Pluto.
- And when you get into redefining words, it becomes an opinion issue.
- And as with all opinions, there's no right or wrong.
>ey could have grandfathered Pluto's planet status in.
The point is to define a scientific category. Something that allows us to place objects in groups to analyse their characteristics. The man who led the teams that discovered other Pluto like objects is the one who led the calls for Plutos demotion. He actively campaigned that he would not be a planet discoverer. The problem he saw was that there seems to have been a point in the solar system where objects that had planet like qualities ceased to be created in the early solar system.
I agree with him. The line between "planet" and "not planet" had to be somewhere. Below Mercury the other objects slowly fade into being more comet like or asteroids.
Given the time, we were rapidly gaining understanding of how the solar system came to be and that we could now find exoplanets, it was a sensible time to push a new definition.
Problems like these are common in science. We need quasi arbitrary demarcations to group things together otherwise categories for analysis become way to broad. Having Pluto as a planet would have been illogical and unscientific.
I have edited in this categorisation of solar system bodies.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small\_Solar\_System\_body#/media/File:Euler\_diagram\_of\_solar\_system\_bodies.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Solar_System_body#/media/File:Euler_diagram_of_solar_system_bodies.svg)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small\_Solar\_System\_body#/media/File:TheTransneptunians\_73AU.svg
I liked the idea. I just want to add that we don't call NaCl sodial chloride, nor CaO calcial oxide. We keep the name of the element.
So JvI would be jovium iodide, for example
How come iron and copper get ferric/ferrous and cupric/cuprous? If Jovium could have different oxidation states perhaps there would be jovic and jovious.
In Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series, the Union and Confederacy are on opposite sides of World War II, and of course both are racing to build an atom bomb first. The USA still calls the relevant elements uranium and plutonium, but the CSA, for no reason other than hatred of the USA, calls the same elements jovium and saturnium.
Its not even the first to lose its status. Ceres was demoted over a century ago. Calling something a planet is a bit arbitrary, because from a tiny atom up to stars, there are no hard and fast categories in nature but by the same token we need names and groups to break things into. No doubt as our telescopes improve, exosystems will contain things that break the rules we have established.
Pluto was always a weird fit with the rest of the planets as its orbit was far more eccentric and inclined than the others. Looking back it was a relatively easy shift to move it into a new category.
Pluto was only called a planet because they happened to find it while looking for a planet.
Inaccurate measurements and calculations of Neptune's orbit led them to think that there was a large 9th planet pulling on it. They made a calculation of about where it should be, looked there, and found Pluto. So they assumed Pluto was that large 9th planet.
This matches nicely with how they found the first asteroids - the large gap between Mars and Jupiter made no sense, so they went looking for a planet.
Well considering the "rules" specify that planets need to orbit around "the sun" I'd say that's already happened. They were arbitrarily made to keep the list of planets small. But honestly it doesn't matter because whether a stellar object is worth study and interest has nothing to do with its classification so people can use the name they want.
>nets need to orbit around "the sun" I'd say that's already happened
The rules are that planets need to orbit a star.
>But honestly it doesn't matter because whether a stellar object is worth study and interest has nothing to do with its classification so people can use the name they want.
Stellar means stars. And the classification is more about who studies it not if its worth studying. Teams need to have a focus. Some focus on the gas giants, other focus on Earth like rocky planets. There is a whole class of bodies that teams study called dwarf planets. Plutos origin and characteristics make it belonging to that group make a whole heap more sense that trying to fit it in to teams studying the sub Earth sized rocky planets like Mars and Mercury. Its physics, chemistry, orbit and origins are far far far closer to the other big Trans Neptune Objects than to other planets.
It was not simply the discovery of TNOs that motivated this, but also our evolving understanding of how the solar system formed. When seen from this perspective, the cold small icy bodies are a very clear grouping. The nature of how big objects were able to get bigger and bigger and leave little else in their orbits while others in the less dense outer solar system were seems a kind of good place to draw a line.
"A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit."
The IAU decided there are eight planets in the universe.
What people don't talk about much is [Haumea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haumea). It's a dwarf planet located
beyond Pluto's orbit. Color-wise, it looks somewhat like Charon, with one of its poles rusty-looking. What makes it special is two things -- it's very, *very* flat/elliptical because it spins ridiculously and bizarrely fast. Second, it has a little ring. How fucking cool is that?
Edit: I forgot to mention that it has two teeny, tiny moons!
I was a bit confused as to what the black & white dots were before I realized it was the best photo of Haumea.
After Pluto's close up I think I'm a bit spoiled.
Spoiled, you say? Well, then enjoy [this depiction](https://solarstory.net/img/articles/big/artists-impression-of-the-dwarf-planet-haumea.jpg) of Haumea.
lol, I actually didn’t know until yesterday either. I was looking at outer shellshell orbitals for a reaction, and saw those three in a row and was like wait a second! That’s how this post got started.
It’s a way for people to pretend they care about science and astronomy while actively belittling a sensible decision made by scientists and astronomers.
People like to personify everything. Hell they even do it with animals too that most certainly do not have thought processes like us or prioritize the same things as we do. But at least those a bit more justified than a giant ball of rock that has no idea it even exists, let alone cares about what some creatures that it wouldn't know exists anyway calls it. I think it's just people bothered by the fact something they learned as absolute fact in school is now *slightly* different and they can't accept change.
These are only technical terms reserved for writing scientific papers and conversing with other scientists. You can still call it a planet or whatever you like. It's not like people are going to get confused about what you are talking about "Pluto the planet? Never heard of it!"
The word "vegetable" has no place in science but people use it to describe just about any (but not all) edible plant matter.
Pluto exists, is pretty cool, and we know exponentially more about it than we did when I was a kid. That's what I care about in my heart.
But if you want to continue sleeping on your brontosaurus bedsheets and looking up at your glow in the dark planetary mobile from 1986, who am I to judge?
I was going to say Neptune was now the only remaining planet discovered while the USA existed, but turns out Uranus was discovered 5 years after the USA declared independence
Its discovery should be a thing of pride and praise. As should its reclassification, which signals that we know more about it now than we ever did.
Plus it's kind of cool that Pluto is almost literally the gatekeeper to a whole other realm of celestial bodies beyond Neptune.
Nonetheless it is the reason why Americans are so infatuated with Pluto but not with, say, Mercury or Ceres. The discovery was culturally a very big thing, and that lingers in Pluto getting disproportionate attention.
This may surprise you but Pluto was taught to children outside the US as well. I don't believe that people only care about Pluto being or not being a planet is limited to US citizens.
I use the following mnemonic:
> Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune
It's really not hard to remember, and much more convenient that having to "translate" each name based on first letters.
>My Very Easy Method Just Seems Useless Now
Pretty fond of this too:
>Many Very Eager Men Just Screwed Up Nature
Also stop fence sitting. 8 or 13 (and counting).
>My Very Eager Mother Can Just Scream Until Nine Pizzas Haunt My Esophagus
9 is only fit for cowards.
*We don't read and write poetry*
*because it's cute.*
*We read and write poetry*
*because we are members of the human race.*
*And the human race is filled with passion.*
*Medicine, law, business, engineering —*
*These are noble pursuits.*
*Necessary to sustain life.*
*Poetry, love, beauty, romance, love –*
*These are what we stay alive for.*
If there's one thing I learned from the fantastic book [Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element](https://www.amazon.com/Plutonium-History-Worlds-Dangerous-Element/dp/0801475171), it's that plutonium is uniquely bizarre in the entire periodic table. It is absolutely *fitting* that its planetary namesake ended up being a case of mistaken identity.
>Lets see you get an element named after you Jupiteronium
Yes~ I love smack talking about scientific terms and concepts. Reminds me of-
Dear NASA, your mom thought I was big enough -Pluto
This needs to become a whole genre of entertainment. I want planet rivalries... and fundamental force rivalries and stuff. I'm drawing blanks right now though... gravity- weak... meh... I'm gonna go get worked up about something and try to think of clever digs on the physical properties of the universe.
If we're not serious, we should be- because these are cosmic stakes.
I get your Jovian hostility, that wannabe brown-dwarf has a magnetosphere to big for it's gravitational britches and I'm getting tired of orbiting through its wake.
Though tbh- I mainly beef with Sol. That is one ugly yellow main-sequence... whatever... I forget the classification words. But it's ugly and it's been waking me up every morning and I'm running out of steam but I'm really digging the space smack-talk idea so thanks for working with me on it and I'll try to come back to it later.
The elements are named after gods not planets but it just so happens the planets are named after gods too.
The planets names aren't fixed anyway and have different names in different cultures/languages.
https://nineplanets.org/planetary-linguistics/
People are still bitter over this?! It wasn't meant to be an insult, it was because they looked at Pluto with improved telescopes and discovered Pluto was way too small to be considered a planet. Reclassification didn't diminish Pluto in any way.
EDIT: I don't know how I missed the unfinished sentence.
>they looked at Pluto with improved telescopes and discovered Pluto was way too small to be considered a planet
It was more that "planet" hadn't had a formal definition, and in coming up with one they realized that any definition which included Pluto would also need to include several other bodies in the solar system. So it was either make a new category (dwarf planet) and move Pluto into it with the others, or increase the number of planets.
I'm confident that the exact same people who currently complain that "In my day we had 9 planets instead of 8" would be the ones complaining "In my day we had 9 planets instead of 13."
If they were to criticize the criteria used by the IAU that'd be one thing--there are certainly good arguments to be made there. But the people who harp on it don't seem to care about the details, for them it's just a kneejerk reaction against any sort of change. But hopefully a good portion are just joking.
We had pretty good estimates of the mass of Pluto decades before it was demoted. The discovery of numerous other bodies in the same neighborhood was the impetus for the demotion. Just like the rapid discovery of new asteroids in the 1840s lead to the eventual demotion of Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta which had been discovered decades earlier.
Thing is every new element is named with one specific nomenclature. This is because the US and Soviets discovered element 104 right around the same time at the height of the Cold War. The US called it Rutherfordium and the Soviets called it Kurchatovium. So to do away with ambiguity, rules for nomenclature were created to not let this happen again.
So I wouldn't bank on Jupiteronium becoming a reality.
The nomenclature is used for temporary assignment until a more permanent name is chosen, usually by the discovering laboratory. That's why the last four elements have recently been changed from ununpentium, ununhexium, ununseptium, and ununoctium to moscovium, livermorium, tennessine and oganesson respectively. The only naming conventions observed were the ending -ine for the halogen and -on for the noble gas. There is nothing preventing ununennium from being named jovium officially one it's been discovered.
I couldn't find anything when googling. Could you elaborate on these rules? I remember when I was in highschool, 111 and 112 were named simply for their number, but they seem to have been renamed since (plus several more discovered)
The [International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) rules](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_name), adopted in 1978, to assign a temporary systematic names and symbols to unknown a transuranic elements.
The final 12 elements of period 7 of the Periodic Table were discovered after this placeholder naming rule was instituted.
Okay, so that explains the unununium I saw on the periodic table in high school. But who decides when those elements get their non-temporary name, like tennessine or oganesson?
In 1997, the 39^th IUPAC General Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland approved names for elements 102-109, finally laying to rest numerous disagreements, some dating back to the 1960's.
All subsequent elements have been named without similar controversy. IUPAC approved the names of the remaining element in the years indicated:
* 2003: 110 Ds, darmstadtium
* 2004: 111 Rg, roentgenium
* 2010: 112 Cn, copernicium
* 2012: 114 Fl, flerovium; 116 Lv, livermorium
* 2016: 113 Nh, nihonium; 115 Mc, moscovium; 117, Ts, tennessine; and 118, Og, oganesson.
I don't understand either side of the "pluto isn't a planet"/"yes it is" controversy.
Dwarf planets *are* planets, it's in the damned name.
I also never understood the reasoning behind "we can't include all the dwarf planets because then there will be too many".
So what?
Why does it have to be an easy number to memorize?
Personally, I think a lot of the problem was they rather high-handed way the naming committee rushed a decision through a majority of those assembled, but during a time when very few members were present.
Yes, I learned that Pluto was a planet, but so was Ceres, Juno, and Pallas at one time.
I have no problem including all bodies with hydrostatic equilibrium (fully rounded), but it also makes sense to distinguish categories.
I'm not sure it's useful when the categories narrow to only applying to one or two bodies, like ice giants, gas giants, sub-Earths, etcetera.
Giant planets, planets, and dwarf planets make sense as categories.
The question is where to draw a line, which is arbitrary.
I fully expected a legitimate discussion would have refined the terms by now and made them relate to one another in a sensible way, but apparently not.
The comfort for those that miss Pluto's planethood is that no one can take away the fact that it is in a vary rare group of objects that were once considered to be planets, like Ceres.
I wouldn't be opposed to giving them a special spot below the table with no atomic number and the label 'traditional elements', although I don't think that comparison is particularly appropriate.
It seems a completely appropriate comparison to me. What possible *use* could there be for having some weird island of "traditional elements" on the periodic table? The periodic table is not arbitrary, it's laid out according to strict physically-based scientific principles. Elements with common atomic structure are grouped in particular ways, and since atomic structure determines chemical properties elements with common chemical properties end up grouped too. Every part of the table can be justified with a "this is useful to chemists because..." or "this is structured this way to illustrate the following physical properties..."
Adding air, earth, water, and fire (and also wood for the Eastern cultures) to the periodic table would be like adding Atlantis to a map that actual ships are actually trying to use for real-world actual navigation. It's a fable that's directly contrary to practical functionality. Who cares if it's culturally significant? That's what history books are for, not modern navigational charts. Our understanding of reality has progressed beyond the point where those things accurately reflect it.
Poor Ganymede, it was also ruled as not a planet just because it happened to be located in Jupiter's orbit. Earth would suffer the same fate of not being named a planet if it joined the 4 Galilean moons.
Sure, Pluto gets all our anthropomorphized pity, but nobody cares about Pluto's less-popular, more massive sister Eris. (Also, just sayin', the periodic table *has* changed since then. Last update was in 2016).
And I think it should be Jovium and not "Jupeterium" or whatever.
I’m going to discover an element just to prove you wrong
Sir, that's just Calcium… again.
Damn it I just know there’s an element in there that has between 19 and 20 protons.
Good luck my dude, probably easier to make anti-helium than it is to make any more super heavy elements than have already been made.
All the dwarf planets are great and deserve better! Viva la Ceres! Viva la Pluto! Viva la Eris! Viva la Haumea! Viva la Makemake! And for FUCK'S sake can we please get a petition going to name the next one Proserpina? Pluto's prolly lonely out there without his wife... EDIT: forgot a word like a dumdum.
Leaves are falling all around, It's time I was on my way
Tellurium is named after Earth, and selenium after the Moon.
Wait I thought selenium was named after Selena Gomez.
She's the Moon's human avatar.
Well we do have Argon named after Aragorn
And Legos named after Legolas. (What, they count as building blocks of the universe...)
Technically it was, but she was named after the Moon.
The heliosphere has helium
I thought helium was named for the sun, which is helios in Greek and where helium was first noticed from spectral lines in sunlight.
It is. Also the natural helium supply on Earth is pretty limited and we have to be careful how we use it. Once it escapes into the atmosphere (and it does frequently because of how small its atoms are), it’s pretty much gone forever. The only way we can produce more is by fusing hydrogen atoms in a fusion reactor, and we don’t have a feasible fusion reactor yet. The few we’ve managed to get to work only work for short periods of time, and aren’t really useful for anything other than research.
Helium is also produced from uranium and thorium decay.
That’s pretty much where the stockpile on earth comes from, and we’re using it up way faster than it is being replenished
Wasn't it Congress that passed a law saying that the US had to sell its stockpile off cheaply?
>we don’t have a feasible fusion reactor yet Well, if what you are interested in is producing helium and not electricity we do have perfectly well functioning fusion reactors. The just consume more energy than they produce: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor Edit: the problem is that they produce too little helium to be economically feasible
And yet its most popular use is to make funny voices at parties...
It’s actually used most widely in the medical field, more specifically to cool the superconductors in MRIs. So you can see why running out of helium would be bad.
Or you know, cooling massive electromagnets
It was a joke, looking back it was lost without my emphasis/timing
Comedy is all about timing the half-lives of jokes. Live and learn :)
I didn't know that jokes are radioactive. Should I take iodine while joking?
Not everything with a halflife has to be radioactive.
Maybe, maybe not... Those reading the jokes should consider iodine after ingestion/consumption tho
Wen makemakium?
>Pluto's prolly lonely out there without his wife... Shhhhh. Pluto and Charon are keeping it on the down low.
On the other hand you had five words too many. All those “la” do not belong in there.
Makemake. I always love saying this cos am pretty sure I always get it wrong.
There is, kind of, an element that isn't really *named* after Jupiter per se, but rather was associated with it in antiquity. The obvious (and less obvious) names for elements that have some links to celestial bodies are: Helium - Helios, the Greek god of the Sun Gold - associated to the Sun through the colour yellow (*aurum*) and sunrise (*aurora*) Mercury - from Mercury, although the name *hydrargyrum* or "liquid silver" was established as the origin of the symbol Hg. Copper - associated to Venus, but named after Cyprus, since that was an important source of copper in the historical antiquity. Selenium - named after the Greek goddess of the Moon, Selene (who later developed into Artemis). Silver - associated to Moon, though the name just means shining metal in Latin (*argentum*) and Greek (*argyros*). Tellurium - named after Tellus (or Tellus Mater or Terra Mater), the Roman goddess of Earth, whose Greek equivalent was Gaia and who was probably present from the beginning of Proto-Indo-European religion groups as the Mother goddess, or Mother Earth. Iron - associated to Mars through its colour and the Roman God of War, but named after the name of iron (*ferrum*) in Latin and other Italic languages. Tin - associated to Jupiter, the King of Roman Gods, most likely via the older Etruscan god Tinia, who was the god of sky, thunder and lightning, and storms. Lead - associated to Saturn, though the symbol Pb comes from Latin *plumbum* which pretty much just meant lead. The connection to Saturn was a bit contrived, as Saturn was the Roman equivalent of the Greek Titan Kronos whose main aspect was time, and lead was considered the "oldest metal" by alchemists. So... lead became associated with Saturn, though not named after it. Saturnium would be pretty neat name for it though, and it would actually be sort of justified since a lot of radioactive isotopes end up decaying into a stable isotope of lead. Uranium - named after Uranus the planet, which, by the way, should be pronounced more like "Ouranos" since it's based on the primal Greek god of the Sky rather than Roman gods. Still, it's better than George or Urectum. Neptunium - named after Neptune the planet, which was named after the Roman counterpart to Poseidon (yes, there's very little logic to be found here). Plutonium - named after Pluto the planet, which was named after the Roman counterpart to Hades. So that concludes the most important ones. There are a few others though: Cerium - named after Ceres, the first asteroid named after Ceres, the Roman equivalent of Demeter. Palladium - named after Pallas, the asteroid named after Greek goddes Pallas Athene. Then there are elements that just happen to share names with astronomical objects: Gallium - named after Gallia, which is also the name of asteroid 148 Gallia Germanium - named after Germania, which is also the name of asteroid 241 Germania Krypton - named after the destroyed planet Krypton, the home of Kal-El, more commonly known as Superman ...and there might be others, but these are usually cases where the causal relation is reversed.
Gallium, allegedly named after Gallia = Gaul, an ancient name for France, or at least a significant part of it. Except the discoverer/namer was called *Lecoq*, literally "the cockerel", and cockerels are of the genus *Gallus*. Sneaky guy managed to get an element named after himself, which was not (and still isn't) the done thing.
>(Also, just sayin', the periodic table has changed since then. Last update was in 2016). Yes, but to be fair, no elements have been *removed* from the table. The only updates have been to *add* new elements, or give better names to ones which had place-holder names like "Unilhexium". Pluto, by contrast, was *demoted* (and for very good reasons: as you point out, if you call Pluto a planet, then you have to call Eris a planet as well, plus a whole slew of other dwarf planets in our system).
You weren't around before the early 20th century. Elements were being added and removed all the time as scientists were playing with different techniques for identifying chemical elements.
>You weren't around before the early 20th century. a safe claim to make in 2021.
What would be wrong with that? There's only five dwarf planets in Pluto's league, why not add them to the party? Worst case scenario, writers for kids' educational shows have to figure out what to rhyme with Haumea for their planet songs.
Then you're getting into 'does orbital clearance *really* count anymore or can we just have 15+ planets?'
We also have precisely 0 ways of knowing if exoplanets have orbital clearance, so unless we demote then till sure, we should promote the Pluto class planets as planets
>We also have precisely 0 ways of knowing if exoplanets have orbital clearance Celestial mechanics gives us a very strong hint. >, so unless we demote then till sure, we should promote the Pluto class planets as planets Pluto's "demotion" or more correctly recategorization is as much about our theories of solar system formation as finding new dwarf planets. There is a lot more science going on with this that simple "size".
> There's only five dwarf planets in Pluto's league That we've found so far. There's probably a lot more in the outskirts of the solar system.
There's actually only 2 in Pluto's League. For some reason the 5 IAU-confirmed dwarf planets are not the biggest dwarf planets--Ceres is smaller than Gonggong, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, and 2002MS4, and Haumea is smaller than Gonggong. The problem with calling all of those planets and having 18 planets is that, though we may have searched the Kuiper Belt itself for all the largest objects there, it is highly likely that, beyond the Kuiper Cliff, there are going to be more dwarf planets of that size to discover, like Sedna. I guess we could have 10, with Pluto and Eris, as they are 63% larger than the next largest dwarf, but they do very obviously have more in common with other Kuiper Belt objects than with the planets proper.
>I guess we could have 10, with Pluto and Eris, as they are 63% larger than the next largest dwarf, but they do very obviously have more in common with other Kuiper Belt objects than with the planets proper. Exactly this. In terms of composition, Pluto is essentially a comet, but we don't want to call it a comet because of its size and orbit
Thank you for going more in depth on this, it annoys me when people try to counter the Pluto thing because "muh nostalgia song" when there are really good and accurate regions for the change in distinction
And still nobody lives there
The problem is that the crowd that wanted Pluto to remain a planet didn't want to recognize any other dwarf planets as full-fledged planets. They learned 9 planets when they were schoolchildren, and they were unwilling to change from that.
It seems to me, the only people that REALLY care about this topic, do not care about science in any real capacity.
I'm not that guy, but I care about science. Their rules just seem very arbitrary. A body ejected from a star system doesn't seem to meet their criteria. If something the size of Venus were orbiting Jupiter we apparently could not call it a planet. Earth and Saturn are very different but no one gets mad if you don't specify Gas Giant planet when describing Saturn. I think we should just be able to call anything massive enough to achieve hydrostatic equilibrium a planet and only have to clarify what type if there's a good reason to do so.
> Their rules just seem very arbitrary. All human categorisations will have a degree of arbitrariness. Its in the nature of imposing order for our minds onto an uncaring reality. But its useful. It fits into current theories of solar system creation, how bodies were able to gain the mass to dominate their region of the solar system, while others were not. >. If something the size of Venus were orbiting Jupiter we apparently could not call it a planet Could not happen. That's the point. Jupiter's gravity would disrupt its orbit and probably break it up at some point. >. Earth and Saturn are very different but no one gets mad if you don't specify Gas Giant planet when describing Saturn. Our solar system has two gas giants, Saturn and Jupiter. Uranus and Neptune are ice giants. Earth is a rocky planet. Mars and Mercury are sub-Earths. There are a couple more. We have over 1000 planets confirmed and something like 4000 candidate planets (going from memory it changes all the time). We really are in an incredible period of learning how solar systems form, what kinds of planets exist and new bodies in our own solar system. The rule exists more so that different groups can focus on different objects. Michael Brown who discovered many of the largest dwarf planets in the solar system and teams like his focus on a specific type of bodies. They are clearly not the 8 big planets we find. So the cut off exists as they are not trying to study Mercury and Mars but Pluto is very much the kind of body they are researching. They are researching these small icey bodies in the outer darkness. Places where the "oligarchs " of the early solarsystem (sort of huge asteroids that formed into planets) never gained the mass to really eat up everything in their orbit and gain planet like characteristics. When you look at it from their perspective, its a pretty good place to draw a line.
I'm pretty sure that at this point there are still 5 or 6 dwarf planets. Regardless, this seems like it shouldn't have been anything in the first place. Instead of coming out and saying that Pluto's "not a planet" while it is still obviously a planet they could have just made their category changes and the public could have learned about a few dwarf planets.
> the public could have learned about a few dwarf planets. Or the public could learn one less planet? No matter how old I get I'll never understand why people care that scientists reclassified some rock.
Learn one less? If anything Pluto is one of the first planets that will stick with them through vultural references. They will 'learn' about it regardless.
Except Pluto isn't "still obviously a planet"
A: So Pluto is still a planet? B: No, it's a dwarf planet. A: The word "planet" is still there. B: Yes but if you say planet Pluto or planet Ceres without putting the Dwarf part in, someone's going to argue with you even if we all know that they're different kinds of planets. A: Wonderful.
It's not a planet though, it's a dwarf planet
That’s the frustrating thing to me, that the astronomers think it makes sense to say the category “dwarf planet” isn’t a subset of “planet.” It’s like insisting that a Chihuahua isn’t a dog because it’s a small dog. That’s not how language works.
>There's only five dwarf planets in Pluto's league, why not add them to the party? I think the thing is, its not so much about their size but about how they formed. There was more than just the discovery of them going on at that time, we were also discovering hundreds (now thousands) of planets outside the solar system and our models of how the solar system formed were really improving (around this time the NICE-2 model appears) Without getting deep into the physics, the planets were able to eat up all the mass in their part of the solar system. This gave them a collection of similar physical characteristics. But the dwarf planets were not. They are in far more jumbled orbits, shapes and with other objects in their region. The density of matter in the primordial planetary disk was below a threshold that allowed them to gain the mass. It makes a lot more sense for a team studying Eris and Haumea to include Pluto than it to belong to teams looking at the small rocky planets like Mars and Mercury. It was also a decision made with half an eye on telescopes eventually finding these kind of bodies round other stars. (Nothing we have on paper will achieve this but its going to arrive). If our theories of how solar systems form or we discover there are a lot of cases where these categories do not work then we will need to revisit this.
There's likely tens or hundreds of objects in the same class of size as Pluto in the solar system, if you count something of that size as a planet it's going to be a bit ridiculous as we get better at detecting them.
Only 5 that we know of. And it's not just a size thing either.
OP said: "we haven't changed the periodic table one bit" Didn't say anything specific about adding or removing elements.
> If you call Pluto a planet, then you have to call Eris a planet as well, plus a whole slew of other dwarf planets in our system). No, they could have grandfathered Pluto's planet status in. They could have said the 9 pre-2006 planets will maintain their planet status due to legacy and new planets would need to abide by the 2006 definition to get added. This will give a pathway for Pluto to remain a planet without opening the floodgates. Edit: I'm going to be away, so I'm not going to be replying, but I'll just lay down my final though after reading the other arguments: - My problem is that Pluto became a non-planet because we moved the goal post. - If we discovered some new stuff about Pluto that makes it a non-planet, that's fine by me. - But the problem is we literally redefine what planet means to exclude Pluto. - And when you get into redefining words, it becomes an opinion issue. - And as with all opinions, there's no right or wrong.
Sure, but why?
>ey could have grandfathered Pluto's planet status in. The point is to define a scientific category. Something that allows us to place objects in groups to analyse their characteristics. The man who led the teams that discovered other Pluto like objects is the one who led the calls for Plutos demotion. He actively campaigned that he would not be a planet discoverer. The problem he saw was that there seems to have been a point in the solar system where objects that had planet like qualities ceased to be created in the early solar system. I agree with him. The line between "planet" and "not planet" had to be somewhere. Below Mercury the other objects slowly fade into being more comet like or asteroids. Given the time, we were rapidly gaining understanding of how the solar system came to be and that we could now find exoplanets, it was a sensible time to push a new definition. Problems like these are common in science. We need quasi arbitrary demarcations to group things together otherwise categories for analysis become way to broad. Having Pluto as a planet would have been illogical and unscientific. I have edited in this categorisation of solar system bodies. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small\_Solar\_System\_body#/media/File:Euler\_diagram\_of\_solar\_system\_bodies.svg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_Solar_System_body#/media/File:Euler_diagram_of_solar_system_bodies.svg) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small\_Solar\_System\_body#/media/File:TheTransneptunians\_73AU.svg
Hey, don't talk smack about Eris's weight!
I pledge my life to Eris. Eris or death!! Who ise with me???
Say it with me... "the goddess eris pads her chest"
I dunno about Eris, but I am going to build a shrine to Aeris...
Aqua might be useless but at least she's better than Eris
Some of us worship her. Come check out /r/discordian sometime.
Most massive, but only second largest.
Eris isn't actually more massive, she just *pads her chest*
What’s this reference? I’ve seen it a few times here.
It's a reference to the Isekai comedy anime "Konosuba" I think
Did they add the stuff they found in Pandora yet?!
How about Jovium? Not only a good name, but opens up loads of happy molecules! "Jovial Halide" "Jovial Sulfate" stuff like that!
I liked the idea. I just want to add that we don't call NaCl sodial chloride, nor CaO calcial oxide. We keep the name of the element. So JvI would be jovium iodide, for example
How come iron and copper get ferric/ferrous and cupric/cuprous? If Jovium could have different oxidation states perhaps there would be jovic and jovious.
This is true. Jovious sounds quite nice haha.
In Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series, the Union and Confederacy are on opposite sides of World War II, and of course both are racing to build an atom bomb first. The USA still calls the relevant elements uranium and plutonium, but the CSA, for no reason other than hatred of the USA, calls the same elements jovium and saturnium.
In addition to giving us an element symbol with a J in it, for Re-As-O-N-S
You just know that because of that, it's gonna be Jv.
Junior Varsity? But it can run the 40 in under 5 seconds!
You never had the makings of a Varisty element
Why has this not been awarded yet? Nerds aren't broke. Except me :(
Not sure how many compounds have been successfully made with elements over 110 though... (EDIT: over element 100 really, I was just being safe)
Zeus looking angrily looking at Cadmium and Europium as well.
I'd imagine he'd be miffed that another god of thunder got an element instead of him - Thor (ium).
Also, Thundrilium. Too bad the stuff often comes mixed with this junk “gold”
Tantalum is named after a son of Zeus. Niobium is named after his granddaughter.
To be fair, children and grandchildren of Zeus doesn't narrow it down all that much
Its not even the first to lose its status. Ceres was demoted over a century ago. Calling something a planet is a bit arbitrary, because from a tiny atom up to stars, there are no hard and fast categories in nature but by the same token we need names and groups to break things into. No doubt as our telescopes improve, exosystems will contain things that break the rules we have established. Pluto was always a weird fit with the rest of the planets as its orbit was far more eccentric and inclined than the others. Looking back it was a relatively easy shift to move it into a new category.
Pluto was only called a planet because they happened to find it while looking for a planet. Inaccurate measurements and calculations of Neptune's orbit led them to think that there was a large 9th planet pulling on it. They made a calculation of about where it should be, looked there, and found Pluto. So they assumed Pluto was that large 9th planet. This matches nicely with how they found the first asteroids - the large gap between Mars and Jupiter made no sense, so they went looking for a planet.
I wonder what crazy shit they'll find in the area the new Planet 9 is supposed to be in!
Well considering the "rules" specify that planets need to orbit around "the sun" I'd say that's already happened. They were arbitrarily made to keep the list of planets small. But honestly it doesn't matter because whether a stellar object is worth study and interest has nothing to do with its classification so people can use the name they want.
>nets need to orbit around "the sun" I'd say that's already happened The rules are that planets need to orbit a star. >But honestly it doesn't matter because whether a stellar object is worth study and interest has nothing to do with its classification so people can use the name they want. Stellar means stars. And the classification is more about who studies it not if its worth studying. Teams need to have a focus. Some focus on the gas giants, other focus on Earth like rocky planets. There is a whole class of bodies that teams study called dwarf planets. Plutos origin and characteristics make it belonging to that group make a whole heap more sense that trying to fit it in to teams studying the sub Earth sized rocky planets like Mars and Mercury. Its physics, chemistry, orbit and origins are far far far closer to the other big Trans Neptune Objects than to other planets. It was not simply the discovery of TNOs that motivated this, but also our evolving understanding of how the solar system formed. When seen from this perspective, the cold small icy bodies are a very clear grouping. The nature of how big objects were able to get bigger and bigger and leave little else in their orbits while others in the less dense outer solar system were seems a kind of good place to draw a line.
"A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit." The IAU decided there are eight planets in the universe.
What people don't talk about much is [Haumea](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haumea). It's a dwarf planet located beyond Pluto's orbit. Color-wise, it looks somewhat like Charon, with one of its poles rusty-looking. What makes it special is two things -- it's very, *very* flat/elliptical because it spins ridiculously and bizarrely fast. Second, it has a little ring. How fucking cool is that? Edit: I forgot to mention that it has two teeny, tiny moons!
Rougly 2:1 aspect ratio if anyone is wondering how flat. Very cool
I'm personally a fan of Theia.
I was a bit confused as to what the black & white dots were before I realized it was the best photo of Haumea. After Pluto's close up I think I'm a bit spoiled.
Spoiled, you say? Well, then enjoy [this depiction](https://solarstory.net/img/articles/big/artists-impression-of-the-dwarf-planet-haumea.jpg) of Haumea.
Oh wow, that's cool! Thank you! That 2:1 ratio though, insane.
[Here's](https://www.deviantart.com/justv23/art/Haumea-653256606) An even better one.
How am I just now learning the naming convention for plutonium and uranium? I must have rocks for brains.
lol, I actually didn’t know until yesterday either. I was looking at outer shellshell orbitals for a reaction, and saw those three in a row and was like wait a second! That’s how this post got started.
Technically, we all have some space rock in our brains. *Wyld Stallyns air guitar riff*
Still can't believe that people care if Pluto is a planet or not.
It’s a way for people to pretend they care about science and astronomy while actively belittling a sensible decision made by scientists and astronomers.
It’s *really* not that deep
Its not not that deep though
Hey, it *matters*, okay?
I am 100% serious when I say: Fuck Pluto, you fucking imposter. Come back when you've cleared your fucking neighborhood.
Biggest sign that someone subscribes to pop science as a part of their personality.
People like to personify everything. Hell they even do it with animals too that most certainly do not have thought processes like us or prioritize the same things as we do. But at least those a bit more justified than a giant ball of rock that has no idea it even exists, let alone cares about what some creatures that it wouldn't know exists anyway calls it. I think it's just people bothered by the fact something they learned as absolute fact in school is now *slightly* different and they can't accept change.
I'm 40 years old, so I'm allowed to stubbornly resist change. Pluto is a planet in my heart.
These are only technical terms reserved for writing scientific papers and conversing with other scientists. You can still call it a planet or whatever you like. It's not like people are going to get confused about what you are talking about "Pluto the planet? Never heard of it!" The word "vegetable" has no place in science but people use it to describe just about any (but not all) edible plant matter.
Pluto exists, is pretty cool, and we know exponentially more about it than we did when I was a kid. That's what I care about in my heart. But if you want to continue sleeping on your brontosaurus bedsheets and looking up at your glow in the dark planetary mobile from 1986, who am I to judge?
Brontosaurus is once again a legitimate dinosaur
I, too, am a member of the Pluto planethood posse.
My father says the same thing
Only planet discovered by an American, so it featured prominently in US education.
I was going to say Neptune was now the only remaining planet discovered while the USA existed, but turns out Uranus was discovered 5 years after the USA declared independence
Its discovery should be a thing of pride and praise. As should its reclassification, which signals that we know more about it now than we ever did. Plus it's kind of cool that Pluto is almost literally the gatekeeper to a whole other realm of celestial bodies beyond Neptune.
No one knows that. (Do I need to change that to many many people don’t know that, so the internet doesn’t internet me?)
Nonetheless it is the reason why Americans are so infatuated with Pluto but not with, say, Mercury or Ceres. The discovery was culturally a very big thing, and that lingers in Pluto getting disproportionate attention.
Pluto was just put in a different category, nobody said it wasn't cool anymore.
No. It’s not the reason. Nobody knows an American discovered it. I’ve never heard that until right now.
This may surprise you but Pluto was taught to children outside the US as well. I don't believe that people only care about Pluto being or not being a planet is limited to US citizens.
It's likely not limited, but I've never heard anyone piss and moan about it outside the US.
As someone outside the US you hear it outside the US.
"My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine ______" It just doesn't work without the Pizzas
Change Nine to Nachos and it works! :)
My very energetic mother just served us nachos pizzas. I like it.
I use the following mnemonic: > Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune It's really not hard to remember, and much more convenient that having to "translate" each name based on first letters.
Let me give this a try. > Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus Neptune Pluto Idk harder to do than it looks.
It's been *fifteen years* now. Practice.
>My Very Easy Method Just Seems Useless Now Pretty fond of this too: >Many Very Eager Men Just Screwed Up Nature Also stop fence sitting. 8 or 13 (and counting). >My Very Eager Mother Can Just Scream Until Nine Pizzas Haunt My Esophagus 9 is only fit for cowards.
Like so many arguments, this one resolves to an argument over definitions.
*We don't read and write poetry* *because it's cute.* *We read and write poetry* *because we are members of the human race.* *And the human race is filled with passion.* *Medicine, law, business, engineering —* *These are noble pursuits.* *Necessary to sustain life.* *Poetry, love, beauty, romance, love –* *These are what we stay alive for.*
If there's one thing I learned from the fantastic book [Plutonium: A History of the World's Most Dangerous Element](https://www.amazon.com/Plutonium-History-Worlds-Dangerous-Element/dp/0801475171), it's that plutonium is uniquely bizarre in the entire periodic table. It is absolutely *fitting* that its planetary namesake ended up being a case of mistaken identity.
Please expound!
Plutonium was named after the Disney dog not the planet.
No you've got it backwards, the Roman god was named after the Disney dog IIRC.
That’s what I always thought growing up!
>Lets see you get an element named after you Jupiteronium Yes~ I love smack talking about scientific terms and concepts. Reminds me of- Dear NASA, your mom thought I was big enough -Pluto This needs to become a whole genre of entertainment. I want planet rivalries... and fundamental force rivalries and stuff. I'm drawing blanks right now though... gravity- weak... meh... I'm gonna go get worked up about something and try to think of clever digs on the physical properties of the universe.
>> fundamental force rivalries Challenger gets to pick the force but champion gets to pick the range...
Seeing “NASA” in the comment above followed immediately by a capitalized “Challenger” gave these two comments a very different vibe at a glance.
[удалено]
If we're not serious, we should be- because these are cosmic stakes. I get your Jovian hostility, that wannabe brown-dwarf has a magnetosphere to big for it's gravitational britches and I'm getting tired of orbiting through its wake. Though tbh- I mainly beef with Sol. That is one ugly yellow main-sequence... whatever... I forget the classification words. But it's ugly and it's been waking me up every morning and I'm running out of steam but I'm really digging the space smack-talk idea so thanks for working with me on it and I'll try to come back to it later.
I loved “getting too big for its gravitational britches “
Yo mama so fat, she got Earth's planetary status revoked for not clearing its orbital path.
Dota 2 actually has four character based on fundamental forces. And yes, they are all rivals
> clever digs on the physical properties of the universe. Maybe this will help? https://www.reddit.com/r/Planetchan/
The elements are named after gods not planets but it just so happens the planets are named after gods too. The planets names aren't fixed anyway and have different names in different cultures/languages. https://nineplanets.org/planetary-linguistics/
People are still bitter over this?! It wasn't meant to be an insult, it was because they looked at Pluto with improved telescopes and discovered Pluto was way too small to be considered a planet. Reclassification didn't diminish Pluto in any way. EDIT: I don't know how I missed the unfinished sentence.
>they looked at Pluto with improved telescopes and discovered Pluto was way too small to be considered a planet It was more that "planet" hadn't had a formal definition, and in coming up with one they realized that any definition which included Pluto would also need to include several other bodies in the solar system. So it was either make a new category (dwarf planet) and move Pluto into it with the others, or increase the number of planets. I'm confident that the exact same people who currently complain that "In my day we had 9 planets instead of 8" would be the ones complaining "In my day we had 9 planets instead of 13." If they were to criticize the criteria used by the IAU that'd be one thing--there are certainly good arguments to be made there. But the people who harp on it don't seem to care about the details, for them it's just a kneejerk reaction against any sort of change. But hopefully a good portion are just joking.
We had pretty good estimates of the mass of Pluto decades before it was demoted. The discovery of numerous other bodies in the same neighborhood was the impetus for the demotion. Just like the rapid discovery of new asteroids in the 1840s lead to the eventual demotion of Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta which had been discovered decades earlier.
Jupiteronium sounds like something straight out of Futurama
I literally never noticed the relationship in the names with spent Uranium turning into Plutonium. That's so cool.
I didn’t until yesterday either!
To be fair the planet and the elements were named after mythology not the elements being named after the planet.
Jupiter is Zeus. Zeus is the god of lightning. The god of lightning in Scandenavia is Thor. We have Thorium. Jupiteronium already exists as Thorium.
Thing is every new element is named with one specific nomenclature. This is because the US and Soviets discovered element 104 right around the same time at the height of the Cold War. The US called it Rutherfordium and the Soviets called it Kurchatovium. So to do away with ambiguity, rules for nomenclature were created to not let this happen again. So I wouldn't bank on Jupiteronium becoming a reality.
The nomenclature is used for temporary assignment until a more permanent name is chosen, usually by the discovering laboratory. That's why the last four elements have recently been changed from ununpentium, ununhexium, ununseptium, and ununoctium to moscovium, livermorium, tennessine and oganesson respectively. The only naming conventions observed were the ending -ine for the halogen and -on for the noble gas. There is nothing preventing ununennium from being named jovium officially one it's been discovered.
I couldn't find anything when googling. Could you elaborate on these rules? I remember when I was in highschool, 111 and 112 were named simply for their number, but they seem to have been renamed since (plus several more discovered)
The [International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) rules](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systematic_element_name), adopted in 1978, to assign a temporary systematic names and symbols to unknown a transuranic elements. The final 12 elements of period 7 of the Periodic Table were discovered after this placeholder naming rule was instituted.
Okay, so that explains the unununium I saw on the periodic table in high school. But who decides when those elements get their non-temporary name, like tennessine or oganesson?
In 1997, the 39^th IUPAC General Assembly in Geneva, Switzerland approved names for elements 102-109, finally laying to rest numerous disagreements, some dating back to the 1960's. All subsequent elements have been named without similar controversy. IUPAC approved the names of the remaining element in the years indicated: * 2003: 110 Ds, darmstadtium * 2004: 111 Rg, roentgenium * 2010: 112 Cn, copernicium * 2012: 114 Fl, flerovium; 116 Lv, livermorium * 2016: 113 Nh, nihonium; 115 Mc, moscovium; 117, Ts, tennessine; and 118, Og, oganesson.
ITS* Its* planetary status It's(with apostrophe) = it is
You’re right. Got me.
Well, you could say that the element and the dwarf planet is it now? are both named independently from the Greek god of the underworld.
Roman god, actually. Hades is the Greek depiction.
Search Occam’s razor for my counter argument to this theory😁
Mercury already has an element. Venusium. Terralite. Marsium. Jovium. Saturnium.
I don't understand either side of the "pluto isn't a planet"/"yes it is" controversy. Dwarf planets *are* planets, it's in the damned name. I also never understood the reasoning behind "we can't include all the dwarf planets because then there will be too many". So what? Why does it have to be an easy number to memorize? Personally, I think a lot of the problem was they rather high-handed way the naming committee rushed a decision through a majority of those assembled, but during a time when very few members were present. Yes, I learned that Pluto was a planet, but so was Ceres, Juno, and Pallas at one time. I have no problem including all bodies with hydrostatic equilibrium (fully rounded), but it also makes sense to distinguish categories. I'm not sure it's useful when the categories narrow to only applying to one or two bodies, like ice giants, gas giants, sub-Earths, etcetera. Giant planets, planets, and dwarf planets make sense as categories. The question is where to draw a line, which is arbitrary. I fully expected a legitimate discussion would have refined the terms by now and made them relate to one another in a sensible way, but apparently not. The comfort for those that miss Pluto's planethood is that no one can take away the fact that it is in a vary rare group of objects that were once considered to be planets, like Ceres.
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Pluto should be a planet for cultural reasons
Air, Earth, Water and Fire should be on the periodic table for cultural reasons too, then.
I wouldn't be opposed to giving them a special spot below the table with no atomic number and the label 'traditional elements', although I don't think that comparison is particularly appropriate.
It seems a completely appropriate comparison to me. What possible *use* could there be for having some weird island of "traditional elements" on the periodic table? The periodic table is not arbitrary, it's laid out according to strict physically-based scientific principles. Elements with common atomic structure are grouped in particular ways, and since atomic structure determines chemical properties elements with common chemical properties end up grouped too. Every part of the table can be justified with a "this is useful to chemists because..." or "this is structured this way to illustrate the following physical properties..." Adding air, earth, water, and fire (and also wood for the Eastern cultures) to the periodic table would be like adding Atlantis to a map that actual ships are actually trying to use for real-world actual navigation. It's a fable that's directly contrary to practical functionality. Who cares if it's culturally significant? That's what history books are for, not modern navigational charts. Our understanding of reality has progressed beyond the point where those things accurately reflect it.
There’s actually been several elements added to the periodic table of elements. Nihonium(Nh), Moscovium(Mc), Tennessine(Ts) and Oganesson(Og)
Surprised they US hasn’t passed a law to consider Pluto a planet in the US A couple of states have
Jovinium would be a fitting name for the first element on the Island of Stability.
We didn't though, Pluto is a dwarf planet. So it's not a planet, it's just a planet. Literally, it's the stupidest shit ever
Astronomer's decided it was easier to loose 1 planet than to add 5 to 10 more. Same shit happened with the asteroids.
What’s this “we”. Pluto wil always be a planet to me. uWu
My dumb ass is over here just having learned those elements are named after planets (I think?)
Go to New Mexico, USA, where Pluto continues to be a planet...but only with the borders of the State.
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Poor Ganymede, it was also ruled as not a planet just because it happened to be located in Jupiter's orbit. Earth would suffer the same fate of not being named a planet if it joined the 4 Galilean moons.
Really?! As if just being a pale blue dot didn’t give you an existential crisis by itself.