Give Me a Break...Is Nothing Sacred!!!

Michael Paul Cote | August 25, 2006
Who the hell gave a bunch of mealy mouthed astronomers the right to "strip" a planet of its classification. What, they don't have better things to do than sit around and debate what should and shouldn't qualify. They could always come and clean my apartment, mow the lawn...
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/08/24/pluto.ap/index.html?section=cnn_space&ref=google

Lori Lancaster | August 25, 2006
[hidden by request]

John E Gunter | August 25, 2006
It was unclear how Pluto's demotion might affect the mission of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which earlier this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.

Well obviously, since Pluto is no longer a planet and the probe was sent out to the planet, it'll get lost!

I agree with you though, Mike!

Scott Hardie | August 25, 2006
On one hand, I hear what you're saying, Mike. I'm kind of sick of reading about the astronomer conference as well. What, did the media finally get tired of reporting what John Karr ate for breakfast? But on the other hand... Isn't your complaint exactly what astronomers are supposed to do?

Regardless, I was surprised it was even up for discussion; I thought Pluto was demoted to "extrasolar object" a decade ago. Shows what a great science education I got.

Kris Weberg | August 26, 2006
They can call it what they like, but it'll always be Yuggoth to me.

Adrianne Rodgers | August 28, 2006
I get sick of reading astronomre conferences before they're even reported. Just before this, they were talking about promoting a few hunks of ice to planets. No Ice Ball Left Behind, perhaps.

And let's not forget, astronomers are in the same leage as the people among us who insist that there will be another ice age in a billion years, yet the next day's forecast is still up in the air.

Scott Hardie | August 28, 2006
I heard they calculated the exact date 20 million years from now when Axl Rose will finally finish Chinese Democracy.

Kris Weberg | August 28, 2006
Ironically, this means that Chinese Democracy will be released long after China has achieved democracy and split into seventeen smaller, more differently-named countries, thereby rendering the CD's title both pointless and confusing.

Scott Hardie | March 1, 2017
This discussion was already something of a mid-2000s time capsule -- Chinese Democracy? No Child Left Behind? John friggin' Karr? -- but I thought of it anew when I heard that astronomers are pushing to restore Pluto's planetary status after all this time. A few thoughts occur to me:

1) Isn't Pluto still a planet? It's a dwarf planet. That sounds like planet to me, just a particular kind. That term sounds like an agreeable compromise, more so than "extrasolar object" or other clinical, classificational terms might be.

2) We have 40-50 dwarf planets in our solar system, don't we? There are so many that some don't even have names yet. And there are countless moons. Under the proposed change, wouldn't those all become planets? We would suddenly have dozens of new planets to keep track of. Good luck with that.

3) I didn't read the proposal, just the part quoted in the article, but it said that:

A planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters.