Pluto no longer a planet?

[Kompete]

I watched a programme on discovery last night, which explained the events that led up to the controversial view that Pluto can no longer be considered a planet. It was quite fascinating.

It started with the discovery of the Kuiper belt (collection of objects with the same composition as Pluto, that circulates the entire outer solar system). And thus Pluto is just another object in the Kuiper belt, where they have also discovered objects larger than pluto. But the experts are divided on the issue of pluto retaining its planet status.

Interestingly NASA send a probe to Pluto, before it lost its status (scheduled to arrive in 2015), so they might have just blown a billion on some little obscure object surrounded by lots of more interesting objects and even planets.

The link contains more detailed info. http://www.universetoday.com/2008/04/10/why-pluto-is-no-longer-a-planet/

 

[ToxicBunny]

This is relatively old news.. Last year sometime iirc.

 

[Ou grote]

There's a fat Russian kid in one of Merc's threads who could be classed as a planet in around 25 years time.

 

[Freshy-ZN]

Mr Current Affairs! lolz

 

[Kompete]

This is relatively old news.. Last year sometime iirc.

I know, but the debate has not settled or has it?

 

[HapticSimian]

There's no debate as far as I know...?

 

[BinaryJack]

Mr Current Affairs! lolz

giggle

 

[Budza]

Interesting that the probe is only going to get there in 2015. Frak that's a long trip!

 

[HapticSimian]

Interesting that the probe is only going to get there in 2015. Frak that's a long trip!

Once you leave this little blue spec of ours, distances become almost incomprehensible. I quote from 'A short history of nearly everything' by Bill Bryson:

Such are the distances in fact, that it isn't possible, in any practical terms, to draw the solar system to scale. Even if you added lots of fold-out pages to your textbooks or used a really long sheet of poster paper, you wouldn't come close.

On a diagram of the solar system to scale, with the Earth reduced to about the diameter of a pea, Jupiter would be over 300m away and Pluto would be 2.5km distant (!!?!!?!) and about the size of a bacterium, so you wouldn't be able to see it anyway.

On the same scale, Proxima Centauri, our nearest star, would be 16,000km away. Even if you shrank everything so that Jupiter was as small the full stop at the end of this sentence, and Pluto was no bigger than a molecule, Pluto would still be over 10 meters away.

And humanity thinks its so damn special...