OK, this should be its own thread, but… 2003 UB313 should totally be officially named Xena. Not because the show was some great part of mythology, but because it was, in fact, a transitory part of pop culture. That means that, in time, the planet Xena will have the name all to itself in popular consciousness. I sort of think it would be better for planets to have their own names; there’s something twisted about using the name of some arbitrary ancient god for a giant ball of liquid methane. It’s probably futile to try to rename the major planets, though.
Besides, we’ve already run through all the major Western deities in naming asteroids. Xena is available, it’s stuck for a couple of years, we may as well keep it.
Sedna is named for an Inuit sea goddess, but incidentally shares a name with two legendary kings of Ireland.
Really, if you figure that UB313 has to be named after a god believed in seriously by somebody, you can change the last vowel to u & confuse those who believe in both Hubbard & Velikovsky. Me, I’m calling it Xena.
Not bad, but technically, Uranus is a planet by the above definition. It’s just really dim. In fact, by using a telescope, we can expand that definition much much further, but I’m going to pretend you said, “visible to the human eye in the absence of cloud cover,” in there.
Oh, wait, JAGeek, here’s a way we can declare Earth not a planet!
“By far,” huh? Luna is too close in size to Earth to be a “satellite” in the sense of Titan & Ganymede. Therefore, Earth & Luna are a … binary terrestrial system! Ta-da!
Some of us prefer to call it Herschel, after the too-modest discoverer.
I think the response to that might be, “We remain agnostic about the existence of a universe beyond the Oort Cloud.”
Many others seem to feel we’ve gotten a crap definition of “planet”, though one at least has taken issue with the notion of “clearing” the orbit somewhat differently, pointing out the existence of Trojans and the like. Anyway, I’m glad to hear this is getting protested, and hopefully the objections will be loud and persistent enough to change things.
Having slept on it, the “new definition” is crap. Since Earth’s diameter is not a full order of magnitude greater than Luna’s, does that mean we’re a “binary dwarf planet,” even though Earth is the largest terrestrial body in the system?
Screw 'em. I hadn’t thought much about it in a long time, but now I’m going to consider Ceres & Vesta planets, because that’s what they are. If astronomers want a term for orbit-dominating planet, they can coin one.
I really don’t care if Pluto winds up being a planet or not, but I think the definition needs to be at least rigorous, painfully clear, and have some kind of universal applicability, such that it’s not simply a matter of convenience for astronomers who want to ignore the rest of the galaxy beyond our solar system. This definition they agreed upon strikes me as useful and well-conceived only to people who don’t like there to be more planets than can be counted on two hands. That’s not a terribly physically relevant criterion.
