should pluto be considered a planet?

Question

i want the honest answer please! And if you can add details why you support that side it would be great.

Answer 1

no, pluto is not a planet so we should not categorize it as one. this was the right thing to do, believe me. this does not change anything about pluto or the solar system. this just corrects the mistake of classifying pluto as a planet initially.

on 24 august 2006, the international astronomical union reclassified pluto.

http://www.iau.org/fileadmin/content/pdfs/Resolution_GA26-5-6.pdf

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

i have been waiting for this since i was about ten when i learned that pluto didn't fit the pattern set by the major bodies in the solar system so it was an anomaly. it just felt "out of place". now that astronomers have found hundreds of other bodies with similar orbits, classifying "134340 pluto" as a planet is even more irrational. i feel somewhat satisfied, but i don't know how long this will drag on tho. many planetary astronomers are satisfied that the definition is rigorous enuf. i can accept that the definition is flawed, but i can not accept that "134340 pluto" is a planet.

this same thing happened has happened before. in 1800, an astronomer found a body orbiting the sun between the orbits of mars and jupiter and thought it was a planet. astronomers finally stopped classifying them as planets after they found several other bodies with similar orbits, and no one thinks ceres, pallas, juno, and vesta are planets today.

incidentally, "134340 pluto" was never a moon of neptune. neptune did capture triton. this is why triton has a retrograde orbit, and many astronomers consider pluto and charon to be a binary system, but two small bodies orbit that system. they are called nix and hydra.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto

Answer 2

I think ultimately it should not be considered a planet, it just doesn't fit into the same pattern or have the same characteristics as the rest of the planets.

1. It's significantly smaller than the other planets (it's smaller than our moon!)

2. It is located in a belt at the edge of the universe called the Kuiper belt. There are a lot of other small objects and a couple other similar sized objects (xena or 2003 UB313 for example) to Pluto within this belt. Therefore it does not the 'dominant mass within it's region of space.

3. The original reason for it to be called a 'planet' was not really based on scientific rules or classification system. Astronomers should not let the public sentiment or any other non-scientific reasoning affect what you should or should not classify something as. It was a great decision to come up with exact specifications of what makes a planet and what doesnt, and Pluto does not meet those specifications.

Answer 3

I'm also on the side of, no, it should not be considered a planet. Not just because professional astronomers voted to demote it. There was always conflict on calling it a planet since it was found.

The reason they looked for another planet beyond Neptune was because they thought something large was effecting Neptune's orbit. When looking for this planet, they found the tiny planet they named Pluto. It turned out that with better calculations and more data that Neptune's orbit was fine without the need for another planet to explain it.

Pluto is too small to have much effect on Neptune's orbit. Plus it is inclined by a great degree to the normal orbit of all the other planets. So many astronomers always considered Pluto to be a rogue asteroid or possibly an escaped moon of Neptune. At some times Pluto is even closer to the sun that Neptune is!

As I said, there has always been controversy on whether to call Pluto a planet and now they have found several larger bodies beyond Pluto. That's why they decided to come up with a different classification for these objects and Pluto and I agree it should be so.

Answer 4

The previous responses give great explanations.

I want to make another point.

A recent Scientific American discusses Pluto's "demotion". A very interesting point is made that as people began to discover asteroids, they were first characterized as planets. In the mid 1800's the number of recognized planets in the solar system actually grew to more than 20. When it was realized that the smaller objects were part of an "asteroid belt", the astronomy community reclassified them and the number of planets was reduced to 8 (Pluto not yet discovered).

So Science marches on. As our understanding grows with new discoveries, existing explanations and models get refined and modified.

Answer 5

Well, I kind of miss it. It was a good little fella, you know? But, it was too close to the Kupiter Belt, which is the outer asteroid/debris belt around our solar system. They figured all of a sudden, hey it's kinda close to that Kupiter Belt over there. Maybe it's just another rock. Oh well, bye Pluto. I mean, rock #487659. They should have kept it, because even if it was close to the Kupiter Belt, close in space distance is like a million kilometers. So, really, it's quite far away from the Kupiter Belt in my opinion. There actually making "Plutoed" an official word in the dictionary meaning, "to 'pluto' is 'to demote or devalue someone or something". Can you believe it? I miss Pluto!

Answer 6

No. I agree with the decision or the degradation to a dwarf planet.
The concept of planet and moons is probably academic. In my opinion the moons of Io, Europa, Callisto and Titan deserves the "name" of planet more than Pluto. Recent observations shown that Pluto is a group of at least 5 objects or moons. This can be easily explain if you consider Pluto as renegade object of the Kupier Belt. Other pseudo planets, bigger than Pluto, are orbiting the far side of our solar system.
We have a lot to search in Mars and the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Answer 7

No and it is a common misconception that Pluto was demoted to a planetoid. The astronomical community discovered that there were hundreds of planet-like structures within the Kuiper Belt so they created the new classification "Dwarf Planet". Pluto just happened to fit the credentials to be a Dwarf Planet along with Eris and Ceres.

Answer 8

No.

1)It's too small (smaller than Earth's Moon).

2)It does not orbit the sun in the same way the other planets do. Pluto and it's so called 'moons' rotate around the center of their combined gravity which in turn orbits the sun. this makes Pluto's path around the sun resemble a loop-de-loop similar to that of the moons orbiting the REAL planets.