should pluto be declared a planet again or not?

Question

1. your answer
2. why
3. any other info you may have to clarify.

this is a survey, and i am writing a paper on it.

Answer 1

No. There is nothing sacred about the designation "planet". Our understanding of what a planet is has changed since the time of the ancient astronomers and it can change again. We are always discovering new objects we hadn't anticipated, quasars, pulsars, black holes, dark matter, etc. One more type doesn't make a difference. Pluto-Charon has always been a disappointment as a planet, very small with a very tilted, irregular orbit. But it makes a great Kuyper Belt Object, along with Sedna, Varuna, Eris, Quaoar and the rest, named, numbered or undiscovered. (They need a classier category name for these tiny planets, but maybe a name will suggest itself on further study.)

Only dedicated astronomers ever see any of these objects anyway so we shouldn't get too upset. Pluto is not the last of the planets, but the first of something else. Astronomers need to adjust their terminology to match what they discover.

Answer 2

no, pluto is not a planet, but 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, and it never was.

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 not 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 in about 1850 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 3

1. No.

2. The main reason it was reclassified is that it is too small to clear it's own neighborhood. That means it is so small that it doesn't attract all the "space-debris" in it's vicinity.

3. The recently discovered Eris is larger than Pluto, and it is also a dwarf-planet. Actually it was the discovery of Eris that led to the redefining of the word "planet".

Answer 4

1. depends
2. because it appears that it has multiple moons, and is not too small. Also we are used to call it a planet.
3. lets wait till NASA's New Horizons spacecraft arrives and brings us new data. I bet this will feed a hot discussion and hopefully at least i see myself satisfied in always knowing that there are 9 planets and not just 8. In my opinion degrading it back to a dwarf-planet was wrong, i can simply not adopt to the fact that something i always knew has been altered by a group of scientists. It was common knowledge.

Answer 5

No because the reason why they demoted it was because there were other Pluto like objects in the solar system and then there would be too many planets because they would have to include the other ones that are like Pluto also.

Answer 6

You might be able to get exact numbers off google, or that website above, petition online? But really the only reason it was declared not a planet was because so few showed up to to vote. Many of the other scientists/astronomers whatever thought it a waste of their time to even attend the meeting. Doesn't change anything for me.

Answer 7

Pluto is a planet in my vocabulary.....
How many years since Pluto was discovered and it was declared as a planet.....alot of years. Then one day, they say that its no longer a planet in our solar system! Its just wrong.....

Answer 8

I think it never should have been declared not a planet. We have been saying it was a planet all these years, i don't understand why we are second guessing ourselves. Here are some websites you might want to look at for your paper.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9110154/Pluto

Answer 9

yes
because they must be right
and it is very small anyway!