alt Hacker NewsThere was a lot of negative press and commentary about "demoting" Pluto from being a planet at the time. But its obviously true that it was the right move, and creating this "dwarf planet" class of objects was correct. It was hard to justify Pluto being a planet when Ceres exists, but Eris, Haumea, Makemake and all of these other possible Dwarf planets are the nail in the coffin.
Replies
Nah, what we need to do is to just extend our heads to be 2 categories and not think of one as lesser or demotion.
Like, in high fantasy, right, we have humans and elves and dwarves and orcs and all that. Are dwarves 'less' than elves? Are orcs 'less' than humans? No, they exist on a spectrum or line that is not less or more. Maybe less or more evil, maybe less or more aged or fancy. But in high fantasy you can't demote a elf to be a dwarf or a human into an orc. |
So, my proposal: Include all the dwarf planets in all the science exhibits, the kindergarten posters, the rhymes and meters. Just like with the upper and lower cases of the Latin alphabet. Sure you can forget that the dwarf ones exist, but if it's on everything, then that'll be hard.
Here's a quick one that I put like no thought into:
>Mercury, Venus, here comes Earth!
>Mars is next, let's shout with mirth!
>Jupiter's big, Saturn has rings,
>Uranus and Neptune make eight amazing things!
>Ceres, Pluto, Haumea too!
>Makemake and Eris join the crew!
>Sedna, Quaoar, Orcus, Gonggong,
>Dwarf planet dancing all day long!
So, again, sure, dwarves, fine. But just don't make being a dwarf planet a 'thing', celebrate them too!
I initially assumed from your comment that all of those objects are larger than Pluto, but none of them are, so what exactly is "obvious" about the decision? They haven't resolved any inconsistency by demoting it.
Why is Jupiter in the same category as planets then?
Jupiter does not orbit the sun (the first requirement per IAU definition of planet), the barycenter for the system is not inside the surface of Sol at 1.07 solar radius.
It is not planet then yes ? There is no push to promote it to a sub-brown dwarf or a new category .
Classifications are always arbitrary and only fits some bias one way or other.
I would preferred we require children memorize all 10,000+ satellites of the Sun. More planets the better. Count the moons, why not.
> Eris, Haumea, Makemake, ...
Don't forget about Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà! Everyone forgets about Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà.
I'm just salty about only getting served "Noodles" instead of "Nine Pizzas" from my very educated mother.
Maybe we haven't gone far enough. We should refer to Uranus and Neptune as Trans Saturn Objects.
Ceres by itself doesn't really challenge Pluto's old classification. Pluto has 14 times the mass of Ceres, and five moons. Ceres is the only "dwarf planet" classified so far that has zero moons. There are still good arguments for a definition that doesn't consider Ceres a dwarf planet.
This helps illustrate how arbitrary these classifications are. They depend entirely on what properties are included in the definition. The updated IAU definition is essentially reverse engineered to fit how they wanted to classify the planets.
> But its obviously true that it was the right move, and creating this "dwarf planet" class of objects was correct. It was hard to justify Pluto being a planet when Ceres exists, but Eris, Haumea, Makemake and all of these other possible Dwarf planets are the nail in the coffin.
I don't agree that "its obviously true that it was the right move". Instead of demoting Pluto, they could have promoted Ceres, and let Eris, Haumea, Makemake, etc, be planets too. Under that proposal, they could even have the category of "dwarf planets" encompassing them, it is just that "dwarf planet" would be a subcategory of planets rather than a disjoint category from them.