what the heck? i learned 9 planets?

Question

omg. scientists say there are 8 planets now.... no pluto . apparently there is no planet of which we call it on pluto. uuugggh. i had to do a report on pluto last year. i dont know y i worked so hard on it. who has a EXPLANATION to this??

Answer 1

has something to do with how it did not have the characteristics of a planet. i dunno

We should all start a "Save the Pluto" group lol

Answer 2

The Sun and the Moon were regarded as planets for over 2,000 years. Along comes Copernicus in 1543 with a heliocentric Solar System, Galileo in 1610 with 4 moons revolving around Jupiter and Kepler in 1619 with 3 Laws of planetary motion, and the Sun and Moon aren't planets any more, and the Earth isn't the centre of the universe any more but is a planet all of a sudden.

What the Heck! says a questioner on Ye Olde Yahoo Answeres, I learned 7 planets, and scientists are saying there are 6 planets now ...

Think about it, The shake-up in people's belief systems was much more cataclysmic 400 years ago than that which Pluto's mourners are feeling today. The Roman Catholic Church felt totally undermined by it. But 150 years went by and they accepted the new ideas, As you will, Rather more quickly.

Answer 3

no, pluto is not a planet. some consider pluto and charon to be a binary system, but two small bodies orbit this system. they are called nix and hydra. this does not change anything about the solar system or pluto. it just corrects the mistake of classifying pluto as a planet initially. if you learned anything about pluto writing that report then you learned something about pluto. you would have had to work just as hard, if your report had been about anything else, right?

http://www.iau.org/fileadmin/content/pdfs/Resolution_GA26-5-6.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto

pluto orbits the sun, is round, does not have an isolated orbit (a bunch of other similar bodies have similar orbits.), and is not a satellite so it is a dwarf planet.

this same thing has happened before. beginning in 1800, astronomers found a few bodies orbiting between the orbits of mars and jupiter, and they finally stopped calling them planets after the fourth discovery. astronomers then added numerals to the names, and pluto recently got its numeral. 150 years from now, no one will think of "134340 pluto" as a planet. very few will even know we classified it as a planet. "1 ceres" and "136199 eris" are other dwarf planets.

i have been waiting for this since i was about twelve. i feel somewhat satisfied. i knew that pluto didn't fit the pattern set by the major bodies in the solar system so it was an anomaly. it just felt illogical and "out of place". this was the right thing to do, believe me. i don't understand why so many are having such a problem with this.

i don't know how long this will drag on tho. many planetary scientists are not satisfied that the definition is rigorous enough.

Answer 4

OK this is simple, 400 astronomers got together and decided that Pluto is not a planet. It and several other solar objects are "dwarf planets." (About 300 voted for the change.)

However within the same union that made this decision there are over 4,000 members world wide. So now that decision is being challenged.

The challenge is based on the definitions of a planet. The biggest debate will be over the clause that a planet will have had to "clear it's orbit." This rule means we have no planets at all!!! No planet has a clear course in it's orbit and probably never will. There is just too much junk out in space floating around.

The reality is that Pluto will likely reclaim it's "planet hood" in a few years. Other solar bodies will become planets as well (Ceres, Xena to start.)

Now if we could just get those geeks to focus on finding the asteroids that are out there waiting to destroy us instead of screwing up our text books.

Answer 5

Where have you been the past two months?

Yes, Pluto has been reclassified as a "Dwarf Planet" due to it's small size, and different orbit around the sun. (imagine each planet going around the sun on an equator line, each rotating around it East to West. Pluto goes in an elliptical motion, from north to south)

The reason being that there have become a huge influx of planetary bodies we have found, and no real way to identify a planet from an asteroid or other body in space. So the science community got together (well a small part of it) and came up with a better classification for planets.

In that process, Pluto was reclassified as a Dwarf Planet.

Answer 6

Apparently, there was a convention held by leading astronomers and Nasa. There has been some recent studies that concluded that the planet known as pluto doesn't have a core like the rest of the planets and isn't exactly in our solar system.

If you want to know some more, go to this website. I'm a member and they can answer anything.

Answer 7

You are now just learning that poor pluto isn't a planet anymore ?
There are three main conditions for an object to be called a 'planet', according to the IAU resolution passed August 24, 2006.
The object must be in orbit around the Sun.
The object must be massive enough to be a sphere by its own gravitational force. More specifically, its own gravity should pull it into a shape of hydrostatic equilibrium.
It must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.
Pluto fails to meet the third condition.[23]
The IAU further resolved that Pluto be classified in the simultaneously created dwarf planet category, and that it act as prototype for a yet-to-be-named category of trans-Neptunian objects, in which it would be separately, but concurrently, classified.
Prior to this decision several other definitions had been proposed, some of which might have ruled out planetary status for Earth or Mercury or may have classified several of the asteroids as planets. This version was democratically chosen in a successful attempt at avoiding these non-traditional results.

Answer 8

Relax! Pluto hasn't gone anywhere. Surely with all the research you did about Pluto you found that there was a huge debate as to whether Pluto should be called a planet or not. If you didn't, you didn't work hard enough on your report!

Answer 9

committees are stupid ( basis was size and lack of a discrete orbit ) reason was they needed a definition for a planet , everything they could come up with that included Pluto would have included many other objects ( some yet to be discovered so it was 8 or 14 plus )

Pluto is smaller than some moons ( ours and more) and it actually orbits a point in space shared with it's moon ( they both circle the point instead of the moon circling Pluto ) it never would have been a planet if they had known this when it was discovered

BUT TRADITION SHOULD HAVE BEEN ENOUGH !!!!

Answer 10

They have at last bit the bullet and come up with a definition of "planet". This definition excluded Pluto as a planet. But had they decided otherwise there would be many, many bodies for you to learn the names of. They decided to simplify rather that complicate. Was that wrong? Pluto itself is unchanged, so your report is still valid. Science grows.

Answer 11

The International Astronomical Union, dramatically reversing course just a week after floating the idea of reaffirming Pluto's planethood and adding three new planets to Earth's neighborhood, downgraded the ninth rock from the sun in historic new galactic guidelines.
Powerful new telescopes, experts said, are changing the way they size up the mysteries of the solar system and beyond. But the scientists showed a soft side, waving plush toys of the Walt Disney character - and insisting that Pluto's spirit will live on in the exciting discoveries yet to come.

"The word 'planet' and the idea of planets can be emotional because they're something we learn as children," said Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped hammer out the new definition.

"This is really all about science, which is all about getting new facts," he said. "Science has marched on. ... Many more Plutos wait to be discovered."

Pluto, a planet since 1930, got the boot because it didn't meet the new rules, which say a planet not only must orbit the sun and be large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit." That disqualifies Pluto, whose oblong orbit overlaps Neptune's, downsizing the solar system to eight planets from the traditional nine.

Astronomers have labored without a universal definition of a planet since well before the time of Copernicus, who proved that the Earth revolves around the sun, and the experts gathered in Prague burst into applause when the guidelines were passed.

Predictably, Pluto's demotion provoked plenty of wistful nostalgia.

"It's disappointing in a way, and confusing," said Patricia Tombaugh, the 93-year-old widow of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.

"I don't know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job," she said from Las Cruces, N.M. "But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes on. Clyde finally said before he died, 'It's there. Whatever it is. It is there."'

The decision by the IAU, the official arbiter of heavenly objects, restricts membership in the elite cosmic club to the eight classical planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Pluto and objects like it will be known as "dwarf planets," which raised some thorny questions about semantics: If a raincoat is still a coat, and a cell phone is still a phone, why isn't a dwarf planet still a planet?

NASA said Pluto's downgrade would not affect its $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which this year began a 9½-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.

But mission head Alan Stern said he was "embarrassed" by Pluto's undoing and predicted that Thursday's vote would not end the debate. Although 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations attended the conference, only about 300 showed up to vote.

"It's a sloppy definition. It's bad science," he said. "It ain't over."

The shift also poses a challenge to the world's teachers, who will have to scramble to alter lesson plans just as schools open for the fall term.

"We will adapt our teaching to explain the new categories," said Neil Crumpton, who teaches science at a high school north of London. "It will all take some explanation, but it is really just a reclassification and I can't see that it will cause any problems. Science is an evolving subject and always will be."

Under the new rules, two of the three objects that came tantalizingly close to planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed "Xena." The third object, Pluto's largest moon, Charon, isn't in line for any special designation.

Brown, whose Xena find rekindled calls for Pluto's demise because it showed it isn't nearly as unique as it once seemed, waxed philosophical.

"Eight is enough," he said, jokingly adding: "I may go down in history as the guy who killed Pluto."

Demoting the icy orb named for the Roman god of the underworld isn't personal - it's just business - said Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of the PBS show "Star Gazer."

"It's like an amicable divorce," he said. "The legal status has changed but the person really hasn't. It's just single again."