NASA boss: make Pluto a planet again NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman delivered some potentially good news at a Senate hearing this week, as well as some slightly odd news: in an environment of constrained budgets, the space agency was somehow finding resources to contest the decision to relegate Pluto from planet status. "I am very much in the camp of 'Make …
This pointless culture war brought to us by the same people who renamed the Gulf of Mexico to the "Gulf of America" so they could be angry on Twitter about it.
Perhaps the NASA administrator should be more worried about how Trump is destroying employee morale with his anti-science agenda.
Not thousands, but if Pluto is a planet then you have to argue that Ceres (the largest of the asteroids) also is. It’s large enough so that its own gravity has formed it in to a sphere (almost), and orbits the Sun. Eris, certainly has to be a planet, although slightly smaller than Pluto it is, from memory, about 25% more massive, and even has its own moon.
I think there are five or six, known objects that a) orbit the sun, b) are massive enough to form a sphere, but c) are not massive enough to have cleared their orbits, usually by repeated gravitational action ejecting the other objects out of their orbit. However it is not impossible that eventually a thousand objects of Pluto’s size might eventually be discovered in the Kuiper belt - and who knows what might be lurking in the Oort cloud?
Does the nomenclature 'planet' serve any actual scientific benefit?
If not then I propose we just drop the word and be done with it. We can then say 'our sun is orbited by many different size objects some of which primarily orbit other objects'.
I doubt that the universe cares how we choose to categorise things - is there a reason we have to categorise rocks and stuff in space?
Does the nomenclature 'planet' serve any actual scientific benefit?
I think you've nailed it.
At the time of the 2006 IAU decision, I was selling a popular desktop planetarium software under the corporate name "Project Pluto". So people frequently asked me about the controversy.
My reply was that it was about as important as the distinction between rocks, boulders, and pebbles. Geologists get along quite well without rigid definitions of those terms; I could not come up with a reason to be interested in a definition of planet, dwarf planet, brown dwarf, etc.
(It occurred to me later that there could be one issue for me. My software would show, for example, a table of data on planets, and/or a dialog in which you picked a planet for the sky chart to be centered on, and so forth. And you could turn display of planets on/off independently of asteroids. I didn't really want to change my software to reflect the IAU's changed definition.
So I didn't. I continued to sell the software for some years. Nobody even asked why Pluto was still treated as a 'planet' in it.)
I think the controversy about the planetary status is doing science a service. It elicits curiosity. I first read about the existence of Ceres because of a discussion on Pluto. In the end, anyone even cursorily interested will walk away with added appreciation for the amount and variety of space rocks orbiting our star.
Ironically Ceres was originally classified as a planet. Then we discovered the rest of the asteroid belt, and realised it was more like the other asteroids than the planets, and it was reclassified. Just as Pluto was reclassified once we discovered other large Kuiper belt objects. There is certainly discussion to be had about the actual criteria that were used to reclassify Pluto, which are far from ideal, and if the IAU were to come up with a scientifically rational set of classification rules that reclassified Pluto as a planet, that would be fine, but I find that highly unlikely.
I accept that this is a problem. Where scientific classification has come along after the language has been decided. So for example, a strawberry is not actually a berry - but a banana is. In fact, most fruit whose name ends in berry, aren't actually berries. Which leads me to question the wisdom of the scientists, who didn't find a different set of names to avoid what is obviously now confusing.
However, the Pluto decision is even worse. Since Neptune has failed to clear its orbit of Pluto - then Neptune can't be a planet either. So if you're going to classify in this way, then the answer is to actually pick a classification that works. Or pick Ceres - and make it a planet - since it's bigger. And then define planet as anything bigger than Pluto Or just do nothing and not create any more confusion. Or do it in secret and don't tell anyone...
It's not the end of the world. Unless you live on Pluto...
Well in that case nothing has cleared it's orbit.
The fact that there are a couple of bodies in an intersecting orbit doesn't mean you've not cleared your orbit.
Jupiter for instance has significant numbers of "trojan" asteroids at it's L4 and L5 points - we're still happy that it's "cleared it's orbit".
I'd have thought that capturing something into your trojan points was almost as good as making it into your personal moon. The real power move amongst planets!
I'd never thought about it before today, so I looked it up. I think I'd always assumed that Pluto and Neptune would have an orbital reckoning some day - and that their orbits were still not stable and so would gradually change. So hadn't realised they were in resonance and were going to be so disappointing as not to crash into each other in a few hundred million years.
How about we compromise? Pluto becomes a nut.
Like berries, almost none of what we call nuts are in fact nuts scientifically. The peanut is a legume, a bunch of the others are seeds - or worse even fruit.
I discovered the other day that the aubergine is in fact a fruit! I already knew about the tomato - my Nan made tomato jam back in the 80s, so I've had tomato jam on toast. It wasn't particularly nice, so thinking about it I wonder if she got into an argument with someone, and it ended with the line, "well if it's a bloody fruit you'd be able to make jam with it!". So she did.
Then again, my Nan was one of those people dedicated to making children finish all their dinner, before they were allowed to leave the table, and sneaking unpleasant foods onto their plates, just so she could tell them off for not eating them.
You can't have any pudding until you've eaten your Pluto!
I've always considered fruits to be a subset of vegetables rather than a separate classification, at least for things you find at the greengrocers, i.e. ignoring any poisonous fruits.
Vegetables are the edible parts of plants.
Fruits are the seed containing structures of plants.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Not sure about jam, but tomato* often used in making chutney (similar but different to jam as sugar but also vinegar used)
As for planets, in UK we have a thing called a historic county - based on how UK was divided into counties many centuries ago - some of these historic counties still match with name of a county in current classification of counties (but very rare that they 100% match on the old historic boundaries).
So there are things like Middlesex (familiar to UK people as it is a historic county name used by a cricket team) but for admin purposes is part of Greater London. Plenty of UK people happy to regard Middlesex as a county whilst knowing it is not a county as far as "modern" administration county definitions are concerned.
So, I don't see why we cannot have a "historic planet" label to deal with (what is essentially the one case) Pluto.
* as is aubergine too.
Are you scared that the IAU may send the lads round? Relax.
The science of nutrition appears to change its mind about stuff every few months.
Proper scientists are allowed to disagree about a whole heap of stuff (unless there is a pandemic, when they have to follow what the government scientists say).
They keep changing the [Latin] names of plants because they seem to want to rule those derived from names of people out of it. Accept history rather than trying to sterilise/bury it.
And then there is the whole imperial v metric thing. I was taught metric at school, but imperial works best for gardening/cooking so I use it in those cases.
Chill folks. Call it a planet or don't, as you wish. The sky/heavens/thermosphere will not fall in.
Not sure about plant renaming as that tends to be outside the biology areas I follow closely, but aware that in USA currently a big drive to remove names of people from "common" names of many birds (though generally no change to scientific name - a scientific name change tends to be quite disruptive & often met with strong pushback as can become a pain when looking at historic documents when you have to go jump through the hoops of what does scientific name x z in 1870 translate to today - even more hassle as many things do not even have a common name, just a scientific one e.g. many insects)
I know in UK that a common ear shaped fungus had common name redefined quite a while ago as "jelly ear" fungus, the old common name was offensive as referenced a certain religious grouping, though the scientific name is still unchanged & so makes it fairly obvious what the old common name was (Auricularia auricula-judae)
The International Astronomical Union on a small vote decided that they would make the solar system more complex with their arbitrary definitions of what constitutes a planet.
If it was up to me, I would do just it on mass as in 10^22kg so that Pluto gets reinstated and Eris gets to be planet giving 10 planets in total.
That's not what it means to clear an orbit.
There aren't nine planets in the solar system. The definition is meant to be useful to astronomers, which allows for eight. If Pluto is classified as a planet, then there are potentially hundreds of other objects which would have to be classified similarly, which thus makes the definition useless. Hence, why astronomers draw a clear line between planets, dwarf planets, and other objects.
Distinct classifications for distinct classes of objects makes for greater clarity. All fields of science do it.
New scientific discoveries often lead to new terminology. Calling Pluto a planet when it was discovered made sense then. Now, thanks to more discoveries, classifying it as a dwarf planet makes more sense. Pluto isn't like our system's eight planets, but it shouldn't be classified as an asteroid, either.
Astronomers make a useful distinction between terrestrial planets and gas giants. Eventually, as we learned more, it made sense to draw a distinction between gas giants and ice giants.
About that. When I were a nipper, fancy pants writing used to have combined a and e letters. Words like encyclopaedia, archaeology, palaeontology always had a combined a and e letters, but only when printed. (Or possibly I never saw anybody write them?)
When did UK printers drop those combined letters? Was it anything to do with computerised systems having a reduced set of glyphs?
Typewriters caused the problem first IMO: you did get them with dipthong keys but it was cheaper to do without. So that started the acceptance of something that looked better than handwritten (for certain values of "better" and ignoring certain superb letterists) but which lacked all the nuance of proper English.
Computerised typesetting, on the other hand, has always had the ability to cope with dipthongs, that odd accent on "naive", the capital S written as two lowercase f's and every other weird and wonderful ligature that a literate publication could ever need: Don Knuth made dang sure of this when TeX was released around 1978, when suddenly far more lovely manuscripts could be produced than there were suitable computer-driven typesetters that could actually realise them! Heck, there weren't even enough graphics displays to give everyone a chance at fully enjoying the fruits of their labours.
But, yes, of course, even as the hardware became available, lesser systems were created and used. With the introduction of desktop publishing, lazy/ignorant journos who couldn't be fagged using the full-size typesetter's keyboard or even look for the ligature in the list became the norm. Select corners of science and maths textbooks, the ones whose authors generated their own galleys and provided camera-ready sheets to the publisher, seemed to be the bastion of beautiful typography. And the glaringly awful in equal measure (luckily a nicely-laid out stats book will be able to illustrate the curve that explains this phenomenon).
Nowadays, it seems to be pot luck whether the combination of author, editor (if they have one) and book designer (if they have one) will result in correctly expressed English or not.
All of which ignores the pressure to create English written in a way that the American market will accept, as the creation of translations for use across The Pond is increasingly deemed an excess expense (as well as a risk to the poor defenceless sentences), which means the use of spellings that have viciously cleaved the unwary dipthong and crushed one half beneath the bootheel of "simplified" spelling (and the resultant jarring pronunciation as the delicate gliding vowels are forgotten: now out of sight and hence out of mind).
Also their orbital inclination is vastly different. And their orbital periods are in resonance so they can never actually get close to each other, even if, yes technically Pluto can get closer to the sun than Neptune does, which, from memory, I think it was until 1999.
But this doesn't mean that the orbits cross.
Neptune long, long ago cleared its orbit.
At worst, the reclassification of Pluto is a squabble between planetary astronomers who had been discovering many new dwarf planets, and other astronomers who had concerns that were less cogent (“But we’ve been teaching kids for decades there are nine planets!”). It’s solely about nomenclature.
I had the privilege to meet Mr. Tombaugh 37 years ago at an American Astronomical Society meeting. I frankly don’t’ think he would have been upset by the decision. I don’t think we need a NASA Administrator, whose experience is as an entrepreneur who enjoys his wealth by cosplaying jet jockey and astronaut and being lobbied by Dr. Stern, to waste his time on such things.
In that sense no planet has a completely cleared orbit. Allowing for Trojans and similar temporarily resonance-sharing interlopers, anything that enters Earth's sphere of influence gets crashed into the moon. flung inwards, flung outwards or burned up. That's called being part of a dynamic system.
Specifically, a Kansan (and you'll note that Isaacman was replying to the US Senator from that state).
Perhaps I'm wrong, but I think I might cut Isaacman some slack on this one. In his position, I would probably not give a flying (censored) about the is-Pluto-a-planet question. But I might recognize it as being politically important to the senator, and the senator as being politically important to me.
For that matter, it might not even be of great interest to the senator. But it might be of some importance to his constituents.
Another one who recognizes that paying lip service to the hobby horse of specific politicians can get you funding.
And, I mean, unlike vaccines or immigration or dozens of other controversial policies, it's not like anybody's going to die from Pluto being classified as a planet.
By the way, it's pronounced GIF!
"But I might recognize it as being politically important to the senator, and the senator as being politically important to me."
Precisely. Isaacman is a very smart guy. He knows it's a dwarf planet. But he also knows he needs to get his budget through in order to do some real science, and that it matters - if only in a fun way - to a lot of people. Those people are in a position to influence the people who sign off on the budget he needs, so he throws them a bone. Irritating, from the point of view of the pure scientist with little real world experience beyond their lab, but it's how things get done.
As for me, well, I know it's a dwarf planet. I also know it was a planet when I was a nipper and astronomy was my main obsession. Somehow, having my childhood redefined by committee irritates me, even though I agree with the definition. Make Pluto A Planet Again!
"Suppose someone does have clear definitions of "plant" and "animal"
What should they do upon encountering a mushroom?”
Well the best thing would be to notice that this new thing doesn’t fit within either of your classifications. You then need to either modify your ‘clear definitions’ to account for a mushroom, or accept that there is a 'third form’, neither plant nor animal. Now it’s obviously multi-cellular, therefore is a Eukaryat, but there is more than just straight ‘animals’ or ‘plants’.
The definitions aren't permanently set in stone. They can change. The advantages of having one that covers most of this is that you can better communicate about what you find, and that applies equally well to the Arctic residents reporting back about what they found near the equator. If they have to later adjust a rule about motion to clarify that carnivorous plants that have some limited motion are still plants, that's a far less confusing change to make than if one person is writing about plants and the other animals but they're talking about the same thing because they haven't defined them enough that they agree which is which.
They might couch it in other ways but anything that devalues the work of "experts" (like the ones who reclassified Pluto) is red meat for the red hat wearing morons who hate having experts who have been educated in and studied the field for decades tell them anything what they heard from some rando on Youtube, whether it is "Pluto is not a planet" or "mRNA vaccines are not dangerous".
He's the one who makes everything about himself, isn't he?
The only derangement here is on the part of Trump supporters, who maintain a cult-like level of support and obedience to a failed and increasingly unpopular president.
Do you think it's a coincidence that Trump loyalists resurrected the long-dead Pluto debate to capture public attention and social media engagement at the exact moment Congress is pushing through crippling budget cuts to NASA to help pay for a very unpopular war in Iran? NASA is among the most popular things the US government funds.
Budget cuts are always easier under a cloud of distraction, which MAGA Republicans have delivered right on cue, straight from the usual playbook.
This is about Trump, his administration, and their budget. When people fall for the distraction, it makes it much easier for them to get away with it.
the debate was whether to have eight planets or twelve--Charon, Eris, and Ceres being the planet candidates that "forced" the issue.
It is important to note that the designation "dwarf planet" was a compromise designation originating at the 2006 IAU conference. There was no awareness in the public of the issue. Of course, the notion that the general public can be involved with scientific debate is silly, but Pluto being a planet was (and mostly still is) part of the general public consciousness. As a result, this change in designation went over about as well as cross between New Coke and the metric system (in the US).
Personally, I can fully understand the need for the change. Ideally, this change could be taught as an example of how science actually works. But grade school children are not ready for that, which gets us straight into the cultural problem of the change. Junior comes home from school saying that there are eight planets, and their parents lose faith in the school system and maybe science itself.
Personally, I think we might be better off saying that there are nine planets up until high school, then, in high school physics, talk about dwarf planets as part of how the science works in the real world.
Junior should listen to his science teacher. We wouldn't be having this problem if most parents hadn't gotten their science PhDs at the University of Facebook.
Junior should also be learning about things like the metric system, evolution, and vaccines.
We send the wrong message about science when we say the quest for truth has to compromise with dumb people who cling to outdated cultural tropes.
Hence why the US still trips itself up using moron units, because politicians and influencers have taught Americans to hate the metric system, and wonder what the plot is, which is obviously way too communist and French for real, freedom-luvin' Americans.
the issue is that we want to have strict definitions with clear distinctions between what is and what is therefore not within the definition. But the Universe is very complicated and often produces examples that do not fit in with our conceived notions of what is possible.
The word 'planet' is derived from a term meaning 'wanderer' as they were originally stars that wandered about the sky and this distinguished them from the 'fixed stars'. Pluto is definitely a 'wanderer', but whether it is technically a 'dwarf' wanderer is for others to determine, not me, but I would like to know what scientific difference it makes.
Remember XKCD on the nerd-geek relationship? My daughter hates it when I bring that one up whenever she starts waxing lyrical about the differences between the two.
Clear communication is not just something that hr puts in every job description. It forms the very basis of scientific and mathematical advancement.
You're expecting scientists to abandon a core part of their personality, and one of the parts that makes them good scientists.
Now I agree that if research were not done by squishy things with emotions, that this subject could and should be put off, if it weren't for my own experience.
I was researching an almost-century-old topic one day, and came across a strange term, one that had fallen into disuse after a couple of decades of debate. This change in term usage was rather distressing because it meant that any research I was doing from that period, I would have to use context to determine what was actually meant for a particular, related term.
Same thing here. TODAY, I doubt that there is any scientific reason to bother with the distinction between planet & dwarf planet. But maybe there will be in thirty years. And there is scientific value in clearly communicating across the decades.
Just like to point out that there are something like ten thousand Near Earth Objects, so by that definition, Planet Earth technically fails to qualify as a proper planet.
Which shows that trying to create a strict definition of what is and isn't a planet will fall apart the moment it encounters that vague and messy thing called reality.
The budget's aready been slashed so he's not defending anything. It's already been decided that the rocket that works will get a moon grand tour in 2028 in election year before it's decommissioned, real science gets its budget slashed, and the rest of the budget goes to Musk so he can screw around with rockets which have the lifespan of a mayfly.
Everyone is wrong except for me.
Gravity makes atoms and molecules clump together.
If it's mostly icy molecules then above a certain mass the clump is spherical.
If it's mostly rock you need more mass before gravity can make it spherical.
If it's mostly gas you need quite a lot of it before it becomes a sphere, and after it does it starts to change into something else which will start creating different elements.
It's quite simple.
Things are either spherical or non-spherical. Get rid of all this dwarf planet nonsense once and for all.
Under my system rapidly spinning objects that bulge at the equator will count as spherical-ish.
As you were.
