Dwarf planet candidate appears which takes roughly 280 years to orbit our sun
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
(This uses wasm, meant for a desktop, and will download the asteroid catalog of about 65mb, you have been warned)
https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/#t=2009-07-01.717&sel=2026%2...
This is a big boy.
This thing was actually found despite its location, not because of it. If it had been in the opposite part of the sky we almost certainly would have spotted it sooner, given that it's one of the brightest TNOs we've discovered.
We're finding it now because Vera Rubin (the instrument that found it) just came online and is exceptionally good at finding these kinds of objects specifically, even when they're hiding amidst a dense population of stationary background stars.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2026/10/28/science/ed138-dwarf-plane...
> ED138 joins the rapidly growing sample of solar system objects discovered by Rubin since it began collecting early data in preparation for the Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST), which began in June 2026. In April, before LSST formally began, the Rubin solar system team announced observations of over 11,000 new asteroids, which included roughly 380 new TNOs. At the time, the team called this large submission “the tip of the iceberg” and expressed their excitement for the discoveries to come once LSST began. With the discovery of ED138, those hopes are coming to fruition.
My point was that the LSST survey was looking in those areas as part of its "mapping the Milky Way"
https://rubinobservatory.org/explore/how-rubin-works/lsst
Another recent discovery from Rubin - https://www.washington.edu/news/2026/11/05/rubin-observatory...
You can see that it is looking in those dense starfield areas.
https://rubinobservatory.org/gallery/collections/news-images... is where Rubin detected 12,700 new asteroids... and ED138 is in that part of the sky where Rubin was looking.
Pluto has a 248 year orbit... which is close to the 282 years for ED138. 100 years ago, maybe Tombaugh would have found ED138 that if he was looking in that part of the sky.
https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/#t=1930-02-18.717&sel=2026%2...
In 1925, ED138 was crossing Pluto's orbit (and closer to Earth than Pluto was).
You can also turn on the known asteroid population:
https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/#t=2026-11-12.9717&sel=2026%...
Everything runs in the browser, served as a static github pages so I don't have to think about hosting or anything.
Do you know why they stretch so up and down relative to Jupiter? Is that sort 3d distribution shape typical for L4 and L5 Lagrangian points, and it's just amplified by the size of Jupiter or is there something else at play there?
The trojans that you see there sort of do a little dance when you plot them in the rotating frame of Jupiter (more technical term is librate). The size of the region has to do with the mass of the parent body, since jupiter is so big, the capturing region is pretty large. Technically there are other trojans around some other planets, but most of them are not long term stable like jupiter is, mainly because jupiter is just big.
I'd like to take the time to tell you that I really appreciate your contributions to this site. I'm always excited when there's a post about asteroids or something similarly sized in the solar system because I know that you'll post about it more often than not.
I've taken a course on the geology of the solar system and a course on exoplanet detection but I definitely consider myself a layman in this field. I've always had a particular fascination with these small tumbling rocks in our solar system so it's always a pleasure to see you talk about them and your work.
Here is a fun comet orbit for you: https://dahlend.github.io/ketev/#t=2018-02-08.9717&sel=P/202...
This guy had a close encounter with saturn in 2018 and his orbit dramatically changed. At the time he was likely a very cold object that had frozen volatile material (usually water and CO/CO2), The PANSTARRS telescope found him in 2023 after he started giving off material and becoming a comet.
Because he came so close to saturn, it is likely that the estimate of the orbit before this is not super precise, as orbital mechanics is a chaotic thing and small changes of initial conditions become huge changes later.
The only thing that bothered me is the sidebar.
I thought Planet X was supposed to be calculated to be several earth masses, not a dwarf planet.
but it's not great for mobile
Pretty rad.
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.
Classifications impose structure on a collection of celestial objects, and we can derive relationships, commonalities, understand their development, the physics governing these objects, and build useful physical and mathematical models to widen our understanding of the universe.
Most reasonable scientists understand that some of these objects will blur the edges—like many moons being more massive and larger than Mercury. Or like the largest super-Earth exoplanets being nearly as massive as Neptune, or the largest gas giant exoplanets being 30-80 times as massive as Jupiter and hence having a surface temperature of ~2000 K. But that is part of science, and possibly even where the most interesting work is.
It very much seems like the definition was just shoe-horned to stem any more planets needing to be added. It would be interesting to know if astronomers walk the walk when it comes the definition. If I research when planets were formed would I get the date when their neighborhoods were cleared? Do discussions around large events that send debris into the neighborhood of planets correctly reflect that they cease to be planets until it is cleared?
Alan Stern said it best
>"We're going to call it a cow, except when it's in a herd." A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.
>And the IAU definition is even worse, because it produces different categorizations for identical objects, depending on where they are. Get this — Earth at the same distance from the sun [as Pluto] would not be a planet by the IAU’s measure, because Earth can’t clear that zone either. I would say any definition that produces a result where Earth is not a planet under any circumstance is immediately indicted as ridiculous, because one thing we all agree is a planet is planet Earth!
>That's crazy. No wonder teachers and students are frustrated, confused, unhappy. It reflects poorly on astronomy, to have something so illogical.
https://www.space.com/12710-pluto-defender-alan-stern-dwarf-...
Now, Stern's broader argument in that interview is that we should not take into account the dynamical behaviour of planets. I disagree, especially since dynamics determine the static future state of any given object. Take chthonian planets—former gas giants whose gaseous envelopes have been stripped away by the primary. Do we insist that they are still gas giants? No, we even came up with a name for the transitory period when these planets are losing their gas envelopes.
Personally, I think Stern was being a little more animated to drum up support for and shine a beacon on New Horizons, a then-ongoing mission that he was principal investigator of.
To directly answer your question:
> If a massive object came into the solar system and perturbed orbits, caused chaos and collisions, then any "planet" with debris within its neighborhood would cease to be a planet.
There actually are (multiple) mathematical formulations for 'clearing the neighbourhood'[2]; it's not purely empirical or based on vibes. Stern proposed one in the above-mentioned paper. Jean-Luc Margot suggests several more[3]. I suspect a more universal model will be probabilistic but grounded in celestial mechanics.
> Does it realistically outweigh decades or centuries of peoples intuition of the existing definition?
People's intuition for 'planet' in the centuries before telescopes were invented was 'something that moves against the fixed background of stars'—that is literally the Greek etymon for the English 'planet'. The Sun and Moon used to be a part of the 'classical planets'. We didn't even find the last two (or three) planets in our own Solar System until around two centuries ago. We didn't know about nuclear fusion until 1925, and we didn't know other galaxies existed until similarly recently. We didn't understand the inflationary model of the universe until the 1960s. The first exoplanet was discovered only in 1992.
We have repeatedly and retroactively renamed, retconned, reworked, revamped and rewound scientific definitions and models over and over again. I think planets will be OK.
[1]: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1539299600013289
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood
Yes, “classifications of planets”. So Pluto would still be a planet. Then if you wanted a more specific modifier you could add it, but it’s still a planet.
> because one thing we all agree is a planet is planet Earth!
It's clear that they worked backwards from the eight planets to come up with a classification system that fit, but in realizing the problems with the approach, just gave up and created the carve-out.
Also, just as another example of the absurdity of the IAU definition, there's a pretty strong argument to be made that Earth's moon would be a planet under the criteria: it orbits the sun, it's round, and it's massive enough / positioned such that it's capable of clearing its neighborhood.
By what 'conventional definition' does the Moon orbit the Earth? Barycenter inside the parent? By that definition Jupiter doesn't orbit the sun. Gravitational pull? The sun exerts twice as much pull on the Moon than the Earth does; the earth just slightly wobbles its path.
Major impacts on Earth on a regular basis would indeed upset the applecart of planetary taxonomy.
Is this classification useful for everyday life? Not at all, but looking at things from different perspectives for a change can be quite amusing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_b...
I wasn't arguing against classification, just that I remain unconvinced that the classification which IAU adopted is superior to the alternatives.
One problem with the IAU definition: it only works for our planetary system, not for exoplanets – with the end result that we have two different definitions of "planet", one for our system, one for everywhere else.
Now, of course, that in part reflects that we have vastly more information about our own system than any other – but, a few centuries or millennia from now, I expect we'll know a lot more about some of those other systems – we will probably have sent probes to explore the nearer ones by then – at which point people (or AIs?) will probably push to unify the two definitions. My own bet is they'll be more likely to unify them by dropping "clear the neighbourhood" from the our-system definition than extending it to apply to other systems. Splitting the common category of "planet" into two subcategories based on "does it clear its neighbourhood" works much better than insisting on two disjoint categories based on that criterion when you have very limited information on where that criterion is met.
Even something as simple as "planets" contains "major planets" and "minor planets" would have avoided 20 years of people arguing about the names instead of caring to learn what's different about them. But you never hear people explaining why the IAU insists "dwarf planets" aren't "planets" even when "dwarf planets" has several subcategories which don't share the "planet" moniker, you just hear people argue about missing Pluto or call other people ignorant of the technical details of the categories.
I'm 99.9% certain that the backlash would have been far greater if our solar system suddenly had dozens extra planets.
> But you never hear people explaining why the IAU insists "dwarf planets" aren't "planets" even when "dwarf planets" has several subcategories which don't share the "planet" moniker[...]
Because otherwise the definition would differ greatly from our historical classification. Since it is necessarily arbitrary, sticking close to our history IMO seems like the obvious choice.
But, as said above, it'd still have went over fine if, instead of considering dwarf planets a subcategory of planet, the IAU had just not used "planet" in the category of things they didn't want people to consider planets. E.g. like they did for breaking "small solar system bodies" out of "minor planets".
Had the IAU said "Pluto is now a dwarf body, which is not a type of planet" it would have still been unpopular, at least clear, no more historically inaccurate than coming up with "dwarf planet", and scientifically accurate.
What the IAU actually decided was "Pluto is now a dwarf planet, which is not a type of planet at all". Since the sole positive attribute of this is it is scientifically accurate, it will have some level of unpopularity and be the cause of endless confusion even after everyone who knew Pluto as a planet is long dead.
I'm very supportive/glad they made it so Pluto wasn't the exact same classification as the remaining 8 planets. I'm continually facepalming over the absolute insistence to name the category dwarf planets but not have it be a type of planet.
I disagree on multiple levels:
1. It would still have gone over very poorly, because many people explicitly oppose the demotion of Pluto. Demoting it to a different category would not change the issue in those people's eyes.
2. I doubt that "[...] a type of planet different than major planets" would improve clarity much for the general public - if you've seen studies or similar, a reference would be appreciated. But changing the meaning of an established term would definitely be far less clear on the academic side (since every mention would be ambiguous before the publishing year and/or individual stances of the authors/journal are known).
3. "Historically accurate" depends on what type of accuracy we're talking about, because IMO this approach is less historically accurate because we'd be changing the definition of an existing term, without a meaningful difference aside from that (since both are literally named X planets).
4. I'd need an argument for why it'd be more scientifically accurate. Since we were unaware of most of the objects in our solar system when the previous classifications were created, it's again IMO much more scientifically accurate to create a new classification.
> Had the IAU said "Pluto is now a dwarf body, which is not a type of planet" it would have still been unpopular, at least clear, no more historically inaccurate than coming up with "dwarf planet", and scientifically accurate.
This one would have been even less popular! It's definitely historically less accurate when talking about Pluto and previous minor planets, though at least I can agree regarding the scientific accuracy.
> What the IAU actually decided was "Pluto is now a dwarf planet, which is not a type of planet at all". Since the sole positive attribute of this is it is scientifically accurate, it will have some level of unpopularity and be the cause of endless confusion even after everyone who knew Pluto as a planet is long dead.
It's definitely less unpopular than "dwarf body" and much more clear than "minor planet (no, the new one)"! And as explained, I'd argue it's historically the most accurate one.
I'm not saying anything about what we call dwarf planets and planets being the same as each other. The technical details are fine, it's purely the oxymoronic naming which screwed public acceptance.
I find people do this a lot with space stuff because they're interested in it but don't really know much about it.
It's ultimately irrelevant to the subject at hand and detracts from the conversation.
Just expect to be corrected and "well, achually"-ed by people who follow the current naming system, especially in science circles.
With such “well, ackshually”s as “you didn’t really do any work at all when you were pushing on that tree trunk” and “you specified watts, but you really wanted to use lumens”.
If they really didn't want people to continue to refer to them as planets, then they should have chosen a completely different noun.
My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nachos
By some extreme definitions, Earth might not be a planet. Some say the moon is too big to qualify the earth "cleared out its orbit" criteria, making Earth-moon some sort of double planet... like Pluto-Charon.
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.
Yes, those classifications are arbitrary, but then any classification is. If you want to consider Pluto as a planet, you have to include quite a lot of other bodies, which are all qualitatively and quantitatively different from the 8 (which themselves are in 2 qualitatively and quantitatively different groups. Or 3, depending on who you ask).
In the grand scheme of things, it does not matter and astronomers won’t care about the general public’s feelings. It is utterly pointless to get worked up about these things.
Why not? It's an arbitrary line, and there has to be a lower limit somewhere.
In the IAU definition, hydrostatic equilibrium loosely defines a lower limit for all planets including dwarf planets, but at the limits that's a fuzzy property that gets debated for small bodies. In fact Ceres is less massive than what some studies have found to be required for hydrostatic equilibrium, e.g.: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/PSJ/ad55f3 . The abstract of that paper starts out with, "The current IAU definition of 'planet' is problematic because it is vague and excludes exoplanets."
If we had more small planetary candidates in the solar system, they would have had to come up with some additional constraint to separate planets from non-planets.
I wholeheartedly agree with this take. I have something of a personal hatred of poorly executed retconning thus I present the following proposal.
For the sake of simplicity we should use even powers of 10 with earth as the primary reference point. Note that the earth is 10^24, mars is 10^23, and the earth's moon is 10^22 (pluto is also 10^22 and less massive than the earth's moon). It seems "obvious" then that 23-25 are planets, 22 or less are relegated to dwarfs, and 26 and over are giants (jupiter is a 27 and the sun a 30 for reference).
By that logic, if we want to consider pluto a planet then the earth's moon also has to qualify. I don't really care one way or the other but that just doesn't seem sensible to me.
> By that logic, if we want to consider pluto a planet then the earth's moon also has to qualify. I don't really care one way or the other but that just doesn't seem sensible to me.
Ganymede is larger than Mercury, so a definition that doesn't specify orbiting a star would have to include some moons, or exclude Mercury.
This exposes another problem with this kind of definition - it seems to make more sense to define a body in terms of its intrinsic properties rather than whatever location it happens to be in.
For example, a rogue planet is not a planet by the IAU definition. You'd have to call it something like a free-floating planetary-mass object. ("Free-floating" is not the right term either, but I don't have the research funds to come up with a better one.)
> I have something of a personal hatred of poorly executed retconning
Totally agree. Wanna join me outside George Lucas' house to protest the Kessel Run?
I think that's an example of coming to a useful realization while working through the process. It should serve to illustrate the importance of not attempting to engineer a particular outcome. If the earth were wandering the galaxy clearly it should still be considered a planet, no? And were we living on a body the size of mars that orbited a gas giant we would still be said to occupy a planet. At least assuming the goal is to classify things of a vaguely earth-like nature.
I think the more difficult question is what exactly qualifies as a moon. Anything orbiting a planet, including a smaller one? That seems perfectly reasonable to me. (Yes yes I know the barycenter matters.)
And yes, I think ganemede should be considered both a planet and a moon. That thing is on the same order of magnitude as mars. What useful purpose is served by excluding it as a planet?
It shows that the line of reasoning makes no sense, because any classification is constructed to fit some of our preconceived notions. Choosing a classification that builds off our social history is perfectly fine, as long as the rules for classification are applied consistently.
That is not the concern here. It seems to me that you're failing to account for intent. Classifications exist to serve a useful purpose. What I object to is mental gymnastics used to gerrymander a particular outcome. These things should conform to something resembling occam's razor - minimalism in pursuit of a generalized goal.
That is literally what happened - a definition for "planet" that is as minimal as possible, while staying as close to our historical categorization as possible.
Now, I know you'll object to the "while staying as close to our historical categorization as possible" part, but that is literally how scientific fields always approach arbitrary classifications. Without taking our historical use into account, there is no "objective" definition you can derive.
If I'm wrong, please give me an example of what kind of definition for "planet" you'd be happy with. But remember, it must not take into account what we today consider "planets" to be.
No, not always. What you are describing there are shoddy classifications. I already addressed this exact point in my previous reply when I stated that classifications are crafted to serve a useful purpose. It is sometimes useful to hew close to the historical norm; other times it serves no purpose.
> But remember, it must not take into account what we today consider "planets" to be.
An arbitrary restriction that I do not accept.
> please give me an example of what kind of definition for "planet" you'd be happy with
I already did this in my original comment. I proposed an earth centric system that bins mass by powers of ten. My proposed range for planets was 10^23 <= x < 10^26. Hydrostatic equilibrium works well as a constraint to eliminate things that are clearly not earth like (such as black holes) but alternative formulations such as stipulating an acceptable density range are possible (such cross cutting subcategories might even be preferable).
Note that this would result in ganymede being classified as both a planet and a moon. I think that makes perfect sense given how similar in size it is to mars. In fact ganymede being excluded as a planet is precisely the sort of gerrymandering I object to.
As it turns out my proposed criteria also relegates pluto to the status of dwarf planet. I think that's sensible given that it's both smaller and lighter than the moon. However I'd be willing to entertain a set of criteria that acknowledged both pluto and the moon as proper planets - the important thing to me is consistency.
That's a big overstatement. It's how some soft science fields sometimes do it. You can't get away with that in, say, physics and still end up with useful theories, because your theories quickly break down due to inconsistencies. You can't design working scientific theories by committee, because votes don't affect fundamental physical reality.
Much of astronomy is a hard science, which is why this definition came in for pushback even from astronomers themselves. Here's astronomer Phil Plait's take:
> "For some time now I, and many others, have stated that the IAU definition is silly for many reasons, including a line that says that planets can only orbit the Sun. If that’s true, then exoplanets — worlds orbiting other stars — aren’t really planets!" -- https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/mea-culpa-are-exoplanets-plan...
The article goes on to clarify that the IAU explicitly limited its definition to solar system planets - in fact, the resolution is titled ""Definition of a Planet in the Solar System."
As such, it's not even a universal scientific definition for "planet".
Another quote:
> "At [the IAU] 2006 international meeting in Prague, they drafted a series of defining characteristics for planets and put it to a vote. The definition passed, and the outcome was entirely predictable: They made things a lot worse."
> "...the more proximate problem is that these definitions are, um, silly."
-- https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/redefining-planets-answer-sea...
Sorry, but this objection reveals that you either don't understand the topic of discussion at all, or you're arguing in bad faith. No theory in physics will break if you change the criteria of an arbitrary classification.
I'll pose the same challenge to you: please give me an example of what kind of definition for "planet" you'd be happy with. But remember, it must not take into account what we today consider "planets" to be.
Nice false dichotomy and binary thinking.
You're right that arbitrary classifications are arbitrary, obviously. My point is that you can't get away with arbitrary classifications in the context of hard science theories.
There's an example of a definition of "planet" in one of those Plait articles I linked:
> "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."
That comes from the following paper: https://www.hou.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2017/pdf/1448.pdf
The Plait articles are worth reading, because they might help disabuse you of the notion that the IAU definition is a good one, and explain why it would make sense to have a better one.
Arbitrary classifications don't factor into hard scientific theories, so I have no idea how this is relevant. Or what "hard science theory" are you thinking of that relies on whether we classify an object as a planet?
We can modify arbitrary classifications without any theories being affected, because the theories don't rely on arbitrary classifications. We arbitrarily decided what "one meter" is, yet we use "meters" all over physics. We could change the definition of "one meter" tomorrow, and all our theories would stay valid, because they don't rely on arbitrary classifications.
> There's an example of a definition of "planet" in one of those Plait articles I linked:
>> "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."
How does one arrive at this definition, without taking into account what we today consider "planets" to be? What principle of physics tells you that a planet must be sub-stellar mass, or that it has never undergone nuclear fusion?
You'll have to actually explain how this definition is any less arbitrary, but I don't think you'll be able to, because every useful definition falls under your objection.
The IAU wording is, "...has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape."
In this case it just means that the planet's mass and therefore gravity is sufficient to give it a spheroidal shape. (Technically the equilibrium is with the opposing push from the planet's material, which resists gravity's attempts to compress it. The result is a sphere, made spheroidal in real planets by rotation.)
Less massive objects like asteroids can have weird shapes, like the asteroid Toutatis which has a sort of dumbbell / unshelled peanut shape. The hydrostatic equibrium requirement prevents such objects from being classified as planets, as well as small objects that just happen to be round for other reasons.
This isn't really social history but simply classifying the objects according to intrinsic properties, which seems fine to me. This classification could be applied to objects anywhere in the universe without any problem.
The other two requirements are more problematic and arbitrary. One is that it has "cleared its orbit". Earth, let alone Mercury, would be unlikely to qualify for this if it were at the same distance as Pluto, for example. Rogue planets also can't satisfy this one, and we've observed those.
The other is that it has to be in direct orbit around the Sun, not a satellite of some other object. This excludes exoplanets as well as rogue planets. The rationale for this is that they didn't have enough observational info to say much about exoplanets, but that seems like a flimsy excuse. A good definition would apply to exoplanets by virtue of being theoretically sound, and not having been tuned to fit the way they were trying to classify solar system planets.
Okay, and how did you arrive at the hydrostatic equilibrium requirement? What law of nature told you that planets must be spheroidal?
You're only adding this requirement so the outcome fits your pre-existing desired results, since you're literally arguing for the requirement based on what objects it excludes. And what are the consequences of such arbitrary decisions, according to you? "You can't get away with that in, say, physics and still end up with useful theories[...]"
Do you get the issue with this line of critique? There is literally no useful definition of "planet" that is non-arbitrary.
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.
a) orbits a star, and is not a star nor a brown dwarf itself;
i) a star is an object that is massive enough and hot enough to conduct protium fusion in its core
ii) a brown dwarf is an object that is massive enough to conduct deuterium fusion, but insufficiently massive (and hence insufficiently hot) for protium fusion
b) has attained hydrostatic equilibrium, that is, it is spheroidal;
c) it has cleared its local neighbourhood of 'rival planets' since its birth;
There is some controversy about when giant planets stop being giant planets and start being brown dwarfs—typically around 30 Jupiter masses—but this is an active area of research, to understand the fusion ignition in these objects. As I mentioned in another comment, classifications are useful. Of course they are arbitrary and they are biased—they were decided by humans. But the entire point of science is to push the edges of our understanding and reduce these biases and make our models more general and less arbitrary.
There is no academic literature or accepted consensus barycenter has to be orders of magnitude away - the accepted consensus is that a body orbiting another means internal barycenter, if they have external barycenter then they orbit each other period.
The fact that Charon and Pluto do not have internal barycenter is why Pluto-Charon (also Eris-Dysonmia) are considered dwarf planet systems ; and that was used partly in support (while not used in definition) of arguing for dwarf status of Pluto .
Thus the suggestion for a new dwarf category — precisely because we do label times the barycenter is outside the star differently, as you yourself note.
You were so busy trying to “correct” me, you failed to address the topic.
The topic is pointless hair-splitting and nostalgia. It's like saying we can't ever use F = ma to describe free-body diagrams; we need a full relativistic per-particle QFT simulation to accurately and precisely model every single interation. That is impractical, at least for now. Likewise, we come up with classifications that are useful for the present time. If 'dwarf planet' is a catch all for all the small roundish bodies in our planetary system, then so be it. I suspect the IAU will make things more fine grained in the relatively near future. We even classify the asteroids as more than just rocky lumps.
We can similarly say that “cold dwarf binary systems behave similarly to planetary systems, due to the proximity of the barycenter to the star”.
And that’s more informative than calling Jupiter a planet.
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!
Just because it isn't a planet doesn't mean it isn't in our hearts.
Human Categories aren't truth.
"The name Pluto came from the Roman god of the underworld; and it is also an epithet for Hades (the Greek equivalent of Pluto)."
This might help
https://www.google.com/books/edition/On_Truth/fBheDwAAQBAJ?h...
I don't really know how the category helps anything, though. No astronomer would use the category in any work, they'd use the actual properties of the planet. The only people who might care are those publishing paedagogical material. Is it really that important that kids around the world all learn the same number of planets?
It could easily be taught a different way: there are planets, you can see these ones tonight with your naked eye, you could see these other ones with a telescope. I wish they'd taught me that instead of those silly pictures of the solar system.
Even as a child I could figure this was BS - Cretaceous period dinosaurs evolved from Jurassic period extinct dinosaurs, so bird are not dinosaurs simply because someone decided dinosaurs were all extinct?
As an adult I find this has been rectified, but we're going backwards when it comes to planets.
Don't forget about Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà! Everyone forgets about Gǃkúnǁʼhòmdímà.
I've noticed similar glaring typos in 2 recent articles. In both cases very early in the article. Is it possible that they are adding typos intentionally to mask the AI authoring?
https://i.ibb.co/2LLVZ0N/keenlore-proofread.png
It took about two hours to code using Opus 5.5. Finding and fixing grammar mistakes is quick. Not sure why magazines aren't doing similar checks.
Edit: Except maybe when limited to singe character edits, but those could still pose a partial attack vector for a subset of words.
Similarly, mutations are a pretty weak force of evolution. But they add up over a long period in the absence of any other force keeping species stable.
I always feel amazed by the fact that light from the sun takes 8 minutes to reach Earth and is still powerful enough to sustain all the life around us. The fraction of energy hitting us 8 light-minutes away is miniscule.
We've barely confirmed the existence of 10_000 exoplanets in our galaxy, and the methods we use to detect them are heavily biased toward certain ranges of planetary mass and orbital distance
As far as we know, everyone could very well be right here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_Planet_Nine_on_tran...
We ran out of Greek names a while ago.
How about we not use just use numbers or the name of the discoverer for asteroids. Greek names should be reserved for important objects like planets, stars etc.
Five asteroids were discovered before Neptune, initially they thought they might be planets, and given Roman names.
Speaking of which, TIL there's been more discovered in those systems. There's Alpha Centauri A B & C (C is a.k.a. Proxima Centauri) AND Beta Centauri A B & C. You can't tell your players without a scorecard.
The Kuiper belt is inside the heliosphere, the Oort cloud is outside it.
(Character limit 280)