Is Pluto a planet?

Question

It was recently decided that Pluto is a dwarf planet not a proper planet.What do you think?

Answer 1

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.

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.

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 enuff. 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. many astronomers consider pluto and charon to be a binary system, but two small bodies orbit that system. they are called nix and hydra.

Answer 2

It seems stupid to keep changing their minds on this. All the books for over half a century say it's a planet so it's a planet. If it wasn't a planet then they should not have said it was. If they are adding another category for Pluto, Ceres and the other small planetoids then they must surely have to count Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus as something different to the inner planets too because they are so different in nature.

Answer 3

Hello,

(ANS) Frankly, I think this re-classification of Pluto into a minor planet is utter non sense, its at best astonomical academic hair splitting. Its utterly irrelevant anyway, I cannot see what difference it makes.

The point is no human beings are going to go to pluto or the other body thats been re-classified in its place. Well not in my life time or within the next 100years away. We just dont have the technology to go there, look we cannot even travel x1 light year yet and come back safely.

**The only thing any of this proves is how much human beings need to have lables & to classify objects. Human beings hate things that dont have names, identities, definitions & so on. We hate uncertainty, we cannot cope with the anxiety it causes.

IR

Answer 4

To me, this is kind of like the arugment that a tomato is technically a fruit and not a vegetable. I can accept that, but if I order a "vegetable salad" and find some tomato slices in there, I'm not making a fuss about it. Putting tomatoes in a different category than other vegetables might actually make more sense to a botanist in his or her work, but I don't think I'm out of line for clouding the issue just because I don't study tomatoes beyond dinner time.

Unfortunately, some people are taking the opportunity to play armchair cosmologist and say "Ha! Those silly scientists can't even agree on this!" But the bottom line is that science works with well-defined terms, and as they learn more in their fields of study, they eventually have to refine definitions and decide what applies and what doesn't, for the sake of consistency. Calling Pluto "not a planet" might seem inconsistant to us laymen, but it probably makes a lot of scientists' other observations eaiser to organize.

Answer 5

I have pluto in the "first house' conjunct my ascendant in my chart,and i feel it's strength very strongly in my personality,because i am the type who can be obsessive about things,and i have a hard time letting things or people go,and when i want something i go after it with full force,and put like everything into what i want,and sometimes that scares me a little because i can go to extremes so much that i make myself almost sick which isn't good at all,but i do it.I have a tendency to push myself really hard with anything that i do,and i won't stop until i get what i want all done or the way i want it done.It's almost like an all or nothing attitude with me even though i have libra as my rising sign.

Answer 6

I think that Pluto is a planet, another world, no matter what is its' size. All the planets are other worlds, and any-one visiting planet Pluto, although it sounds unlikely, will have to bring along torch-lights to enter.Planet Pluto is a world, that a rocket, space craft, tourists/ astronauts can land on.

Answer 7

Pluto isn't a true planet, but a dwarf planet or planetoid .Pluto is also a member of the Kuiper belt objects ,which some are larger than Pluto but have similar rock /ice composition.

Answer 8

I think that nobody really likes change and we all learned that there were nine planets in our solar sytem, so we want to stick with that. But the scientists that changed Pluto's status to dwarf planet had good reasons: Pluto's size and composition. The fact that it's entirely made of ice and is only one of many large icy Kuiper Belt Objects makes me understand why they needed to reclassify it.

Answer 9

Pluto is considered a dwarf planet now. Scientists have claimed that it is too small to be a regular planet.

Answer 10

Pluto is a planet. I know they're saying it's not, cos it's too small etc. But it is, it is, it is!!!

Anyway, I remember the order of the planets from the sun as 'My very elegant mother just showed us nine planets.

We can't start saying my very elegant mother just showed us.........????

So for that reason it must stay a planet. Ha!