Looks like they found a tenth planet.

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Meet Quaoar tenth rock from the sun.
Leeme see…
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas Quickly?

I also wonder how this will affect the world of astrology. Remember the Hitchhiker book where aliens kidnapped an astrologer to get their horoscopes redone when they realized that they were living on the tenth planet?

2

Actually, from what I’ve read they haven’t quite decided on whether Quaoar(Kwa-Oh-Ahr) is a planet or not. It’s still just an object in the Kuiper Belt for now… albeit, a rather large one.

I mean, the jury’s still out on the whole Pluto being a planet thing ever since we found Charon.

3

Question…who decides what’s a planet and what’s just a really, really big rock? What’s the cutoff line?

“You must mass more than x^10 tons to ride this attraction…”

Cool story, though.

They shoulda called it Arakkis.

4

Stands on Quaoar

Nice planet you got here, small but cozy.

Looks at realestate agent up and down

Hey! Cool! I can see Uranus from here!

runs away

5

So far, nobody. There is no cutoff line, because there’s no scientific definition of planet. There’s just collective (dis)agreement.

6

I thought Mondas was the Tenth Planet.

7

The linked stories from the BBC page mention at least two others…

8

Wonder if all the astrologers will be saying “so that’s why we’ve been so far off all these years! We didn’t take into account that extra planet’s effect!”

:rolleyes:

9

Pluto’s not going to be happy…

http://www.brunching.com/conversationpluto.html
http://www.brunching.com/morepluto.html

10

I hope they do decide it is a planet (and change that stupid, stupid name :p). It’s been what, Seventy years since we last added a planet? That is just inexcusable.
And what about states? It has been almost fifty years since Hawaii and Alaska joined. Now admittedly, fifty states is a nice round number, but sixty is even more so. I suggest Cuba for starters, once Fidel finally dies.

11

Great. Somewhere else I’ll never get to go because our manned space exploration stopped before I was in Kindergarten…

12

Eh, Stuff past neptue doesn’t matter. They’re rocks.

13

While there’s currently no hard and fast rule defining what a planet is, if anyone’s going to “officially” declare it a planet, it’s the International Astronomical Union. Odds are they won’t do it - if Pluto were discovered today it probably wouldn’t be called a planet, and Quaoar is even smaller than Pluto.

Sky and Telescope magazine ran an article a few months back where they proposed a set of criteria for planets. If the object:

  1. is massive enough that gravity makes it spherical, and
  2. directly or indirectly orbits something that is, or was, undergoing fusion (i.e. a star or former star)

then it’s a planet. However, this means that there would be over 20 planets in our Solar System, including the Moon, four moons of Jupiter, several moons of Saturn, Pluto’s moon Charon, a handful of asteroids, etc.

14

Well, couldn’t you include a clause that states if it is also in a smaller orbit around another planet, then it is a moon? That doesn’t do much about the few large asteroids but it will eliminate the moons from skewing the results.

15

From what I’ve read the discovery of Quaoar lends more weight to those who claim Pluto shouldn’t count as a planet, as both are within the Kuiper Belt. But the illustration of Quaoar sure looks like a planet to me.

16

Dear Mr. President,

There are too many states. Please eliminate three.

Sincerely,
Abraham Simpson

p.s. I am not a crank.

:stuck_out_tongue:

17

Did anyone else take a look at this and think “Yuggoth”?

Or am I suffering from some kind of Mental abberation?

burns all the Fungi in his Yard just in case

18

Quaoar sounds like a great place for invading aliens to come from: “Rick watched in horror as the Quaoarians advanced, their liquid helium-II tentacles held high inside their super-insulated spacesuits…” :smiley:

19

Please don’t pick on Pluto. It’s trying the best it can.

20

There are a couple of “white papers” out using the same criterion. I don’t like it: an object that is made of iron has a greater tensile strength than one made of ice. So an object massive enough to form itself into a sphere if its icy would be a planet, but an object of the same mass but made of iron would not.

I have talked about this with some other astronomers, and they all seem to agree that no matter how you slice it, you have to have one arbitrary rule in there that divides planet from non-planet. I think that says more about our need to categorize than any obligation the Universe has to fit into neat boxes for us.