No, yu aren’t. I too was a fervent anti-Plutonian.
Not surprisingly, Disney is having a field day with this. According to their sources, Pluto has no qualms about his namesake being downgraded to a dwarf planet. A group of seven employees also send out this press release regarding the famous dog:
Good Point!
Does this mean NASA has to recall the probe? After all, congress appropriated funding to explore a PLANET, not some little dwarf thingie. This is an abuse of taxpayer money-somebody has to pay!
Clyde Tombaugh must be rolling in his grave.
I, for one, am proud of Pluto. As a planet, it was frankly quite pathetic. Its orbit was screwey, it was smaller than many moons, and its own moon had it locked up tight. Not much to be proud of, there. Now, though, it’s one of the largest known members of its class, and certainly the most famous. Among the Kuiper belt objects, it fits right in, as one of the nobility.
“Dumb luck” is exactly the right term: Smart luck would never have sufficed.
A bit of history: Uranus was fairly easily discovered. It wasn’t officially noticed until Herschel, but Galilo showed it in one of his sketches, and under very good conditions, it can even be seen (just barely) with the naked eye.
Well, as we observed Uranus, we noticed that its orbit didn’t look quite how we expected. It was almost as though there were some other massive object out there, disturbing its orbit. Well, folks calculated where that massive object ought to be, and pointed their telescopes at it. Lo and behold, a planet, right where predicted! This was the planet Neptune, and it is indeed big enough to account for the peculiarities in Uranus’ orbit.
So then, astronomers got to observing Neptune more closely, and it turned out that its orbit wasn’t quite as expected, either. Well, the obvious explanation was yet another planet, so astronomers began scouring the skies around where they expected to find it. Finally, Clyde Tombaugh found a tiny little speck there, moving slowly against the background stars. It seemed awfully faint, for an object big enough to perturb Neptune’s orbit, but that had to be it, right?
Except it wasn’t. It eventually turned out that Pluto is in fact as small as it looked, and the discrepancies in Neptune’s orbit were just experimental error. Oops.
Meanwhile, on a side note, there was also a discrepancy observed in Mercury’s orbit. This one, they were sure was no mere experimental error. There had to be another planet inside Mercury’s orbit, or the fundamental laws of physics would have to be re-written. This new inner planet was called Vulcan. Except that it turns out that Vulcan doesn’t exist at all, and the fundamental laws of physics were, indeed, re-written. Oops again.
Actually, Chronos, you’ve sort of bolstered my point. The errors you mention were based on incomplete or less-refined observations of the objects in question. As the instruments got better, and (significantly, for our purposes) as more focused observations were made, the knowledge was refined and earlier ideas had to be withdrawn.
My argument was not that there is something spectacularly special about Pluto; I simply wanted to make the point that not much close inspection has gone on there, and study of the Kuiper Belt and its denizens is a subset of astronomy that is still in its infancy (for obvious practical reasons). I just think one should not make pronouncements until all of the data is in; all of the data is not in on Pluto and other objects of its ilk. Far off observations alone do not comprise complete data.
Bits of history back that point up quite well. Remember, Ptolemaic epicycles fit the observed data quite well, too. But that was a function of preconceived notions about the universe, not a reflection of the physical reality. We should all be vigilant against taking the attitude, “Us? Here and now? Yeah, we’ve got it all figured out. Those fools from fifty years ago, they just didn’t know what they were talking about.” Because guess who gets to be “the fools” fifty years from now…
Yeah, but that would be kinda cool, wouldn’t it? And it would explain a lot…
I remember being taught in elementary school that Pluto was included in the list of planets but that its status was questionable (this was in the late 70s/early 80s). I guess I always knew it could end up being kicked out of the club.
That’s a bizarre thought. I mean, what would they call it?
Asirope?
Eurasia?
Hey! The second one does have a ring to it. I wonder…
True Blue Jack
That’s easy for you to say!
True Blue Jack
Has any body noticed that Pluto is now thought of as a…
“Minnie”
– world?!
TBJ
[Quote=Yumblie
It’s not like we discovered Pluto is made of Jello or something.[/QUOTE]
[/QUOTE]
Especially if the moon is made of cheese
Therefore we shouldn’t have ever pronounced it a planet in the first place, since even less of the data were in at that time. So now we’re just correcting that mistake.
Funny how it works both ways, isn’t it? 
gay marriage of course 
I may have totally screwed the math but here I go.
Imagine a point mass. Imagine a molecule of O[sub]2[/sub] 1000 km away from it traveling in the exact opposite direction at 490 m/s.* The mass required to just prevent that molecule from escaping is 1.80 x 10[sup]21[/sup]Kg. I say weigh that much and your a planet. Unless you’re a star. And maybe that bit about two bodies orbiting about common point outside of both of them but I kinda like it without it.
I also have a definition of continent. Working on ocean. Not sure how to approach mountain.
- It should the v[sub]rms**[/sub] of room temperature O[sub]2[/sub]
** root-mean-square