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Thanks for pointing that out! Lightspeed is really S---L---O---W isn't it?

I'm pleased he still loves Pluto.




Me too. Pluto will always be a planet to me!


Related: I find it annoying that we went through the trouble of downgrading Pluto, but we still count any rock that orbits a planet as a moon. If planets have 69 moons, then it becomes tedious and I quickly lose interest in learning about them. I wish there was a definition that included our moon (obviously), made sure that Mars has at least one moon, but limited the number of moons that Jupiter and Saturn have to a handful.

Criteria could include: size or weight relative to the planet, distance to the planet, apparent size in the sky.


I had never thought about that. I just googled to find out Jupiter has 79 moons? WTF…


According to this website, there are dozens of "moons" that orbit 10 to 20 million of kilometers away from Jupiter and have diameters between just 1 and 10 km. It's time for a change of nomenclature!

https://theplanets.org/moons/


When I was in high school there were about 50 moons in the entire system. There were zero exoplanets now, there’s thousands today.


I'm happy that we're finding ever more exoplanets! I remember, as a kid, that there was speculation as to whether they even existed.

I'm less happy about the moon inflation in our solar system. It's pointless. I honestly find the claim that Jupiter has 79 moons misleading. A 1 km rock orbiting 20 million kilometers away, really? It's so far removed from what our moon is that we should not be using the same word to describe it. It's fine to call it a satellite.


So does Saturn. At least, maybe not exactly the same number, but a number just a large


Either Pluto is a planet and Eris and Haumea and Makemake and Sedna and.... are too or you let go of what they taught you in elementary school and be fine with the dwarf planet designation.


I saw a Twitter post the other day showing the orbit of planets in the solar system that included Ceres. There were tons of replies saying "What's Ceres? Did they discover a new planet?"

People would probably have a better idea about our solar system if we taught them that we don't know how many planets are in the solar system, and told them we were going to have some extra focus on the 8 largest (or 13 largest, or 7, wherever you want to draw the line).

The IAU definition of planet (which wasn't the original proposal, and which most planetary scientists don't seem to follow) appears to be a conservative attempt to keep the number as close to the "traditional" number as possible, even if it leads people into having an overly simplistic conception of our solar system. And it leaves us with a loose definition that specifically states it only applies to our solar system, and doesn't apply anywhere else in the universe.




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