Evidence to name UB313 as the 10th planet!
Cool…round numbers are tidy. Probably the reason why Puerto Rico will never become the 51st State… 
-Tcat
It’s “My Very Educated Mother Just Sent Us Nasty Pickles.”
My mom made that one up.
I really don’t see any point to calling UB313 a planet. It’s larger than Pluto, but that’s not saying much, yanno.
Frankly, if it weren’t for Percival Lowell’s botched calculations, I doubt we’d have found Pluto at all, and it would simply be one of the Kupier Belt Objects. As it is, Pluto has a history of being called a planet, but there’s no logical reason I can see to differentiate it from the rest of the KBOs.
Name it, sure - but adding it to the list of major objects in orbit about the sun just doesn’t make sense.
Oops. I’d meant that I doubt we’d have found Pluto in the thirties, not the nineties, rather than not finding it at all.
This is the only thread I can think of where reading the thread explains the title, mind you we Aussies don’t learn the mnemonic in school (at least I didn’t). And what did you use from 1979 to 1999?
I learned the mnemonic as “My very energetic mother just saw uncle Ned pass”. Given that I learned it at school and I started uni in 74, I’d guess I learned it in the late 60s/early 70s. So a version of the mnemonic was around in Aus then.
I just memorized the names of the planets in order.
My very elegant mother just sat under nine pines.
My Very Excited Mother Just Shot Up Nine Purple Urinals?
Same here. For some reason, I learned it once in elementary school, and it stuck perfectly. Hell, I pretty much knew the relative sizes for as long as I can remember as well (and I’m assuming that 2003 UB313 is larger than pluto, but still smaller than mercury?)
I remmber a lot of talk back when it was first discovered about a name, and how some group of people awnted to call it Xene…huh? Ummm…no. Why not just stick with the Roman god scheme we got going now? There’s no reason to not make the new one follow the pattern. Some might argue the other way around, but why mess up a good thing? The consistancy might help people remember it beter.
[minor geeky rant]
“Planet” is such a useless word that it really doesn’t matter too much, which celestial objects get called that. It came from “wanderers,” meaning the bright points in the sky that moved around. Before the telescope, that was limited to Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They are the only moving “stars” that you can see with the naked eye.
Then this telescope thing comes along, and we have to change the definition of the word… Ok, now it means “any body large enough to pull itself into a sphere, but ain’t a giant thermonuclear explosion.” But, then we discover Ceres, then decide it’s too small to be a planet. (Along with being in the middle of an asteroid belt.) So, now there’s a size requirement, too.
Ok, so now we have 9 “planets.” Four of them are rocky, four gaseous, and one is this little dirty ball of ice. The inner eight, actually follow a mathematical pattern in their average orbit radii; this last little guy (who is the smallest by far) doesn’t. Then, we find this other body, even further away from our star, find out he’s a bit larger than the oddball, and people want to call him a “planet.” All I want to know is, what is the definition of planet, and does that definition have any meaning to it.
I say: let’s give up on the concept of “planet,” and create titles that actually have meaning to them. Let’s get somebody who’s better at Latin that I am come along and create titles based on the make-up of the body. “Terrestrial” might work to denote a rocky body larger than xxxx. Somebody else needs to come up with descriptive terms for the gaseous and icy bodies.
[/minor geeky rant]
Many very early men jerked sodas up near Pluto.
I always remember ‘most voters earn money just showing up near polls.’ (bonus geek points to whoever names the minor literary reference first!) 
I think that pretty much all of the Roman names have already been used up on asteroids and whatnot. I say for these larger Kupier belt objects, we should be using dark and mysterious names. Lovecraftian entities would fit the bill just perfectly. Yuggoth would be perfect for this planet. 
Noooooooo!!! The Lovecraftian names are to be reserved for features found in the oceans of Europa, dammit. Where else would you place R’lyeh but at the bottom of an otherworldly ocean? Hmm?
We must name it Dionysus. or Demeter.
Then we can use all the old mnemonics, and just add : “… dude.”
In keeping with the Spirit of the Time (how do I spell ‘zeitgeist?’) can we auction naming rights to major corporations? Planet Sony? Planet PlayStation?
That will puzzle those pesky Vulcans!
Xena was it’s nickname in the group of scientists that discovered it. It was only half seriously put forward as a permanent name.
I never learned a mnemonic (I was taught one, I just didn’t learn it) and now I have to ask my fiance for the order every time. I can get Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars… then I get lost.
I just learned the order by rote, but was later taught the mnemonic “Many very early men ate juicy steaks using no plates”, with the asteroid belt represented by “ate”.
I like it. Dionysus - the party planet! [Demeter is semi-taken.]