
You Won't Like the Consequences of Making Pluto a Planet Again - rbanffy
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2018/05/08/you-wont-like-the-consequences-of-making-pluto-a-planet-again/#6a260f4d3422
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magduf
Very interesting and insightful opinion piece from an astrophysicist. I'm
really curious why it's on the forbes.com website though; the "Forbes" name
doesn't make me think "This is a science or astronomy website", in fact I
thought it was originally about finance, which is what the old Forbes magazine
was all about.

Anyway, I totally agree with him. Call anything round a "planet" and suddenly
it loses all meaning, because thousands of objects in our system alone qualify
for that. Maybe we could call the Big 8 the "major planets", and normally omit
the "major" qualifier.

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perl4ever
I don't think "anything round and orbiting the Sun" equates to thousands of
objects[1]. Maybe we can project that it _will_ in theory, given how many
there might be in the outer solar system, but it's not thousands yet.
Furthermore, instead of dividing things into arbitrary categories of "major"
and "minor", we could just as well divide things into near by and far away,
since all the additional large objects are going to be very distant.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitationally_rounde...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_gravitationally_rounded_objects_of_the_Solar_System)

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magduf
Well it's already in the hundreds. Do you want to try to memorize them all? I
certainly don't. Near and far isn't _that_ helpful, because people seem to
care more about Uranus and Neptune and Saturn than they do Vesta and Ceres,
and they seem to care a lot more about Pluto than they do Makemake, Eris, and
a bunch of others that I don't recall the names of that are in the same
general area.

~~~
perl4ever
Why do you think it's in the hundreds? I count less than 20 objects on the
Wikipedia page I linked to that are Ceres size or larger and orbiting the Sun,
excluding Haumea because it isn't really round.

~~~
magduf
So hydrostatic equilibrium is your filter? You realize that the size of the
object can vary dramatically there, depending on what it's made of, right?
(One made of ice will be round with far less mass than one made of rock.)

