Size doesn’t matter
Unless you are Pluto.
Wasn’t it more bc it doesn’t clear it’s surroundings?
And it has an orbit at a different angle than the 8 Planets and at it’s narrowest the ellipse of Plutos orbit is actually closer to the Sun than
UranusNeptune.Edit: That moment when you‘re so done, you fuck up the order of our planets…
Do you mean Neptune? Pluto’s perihelion is 29.7 AU while Uranus’ aphelion is 20.1 AU.
Oh yea, sorry. I was tired, exhausted n stoned n fucked up the correct order of our planets
They did our boy dirty. Never forget!
That’s what I tell my wife but she won’t listen
Come on guys, laugh
We’re laughing with your wife.
What have I done
Oh honey it’s ok
That’s not what she said.
Size is a factor. But not everything.
Weird how many people seem to think it’s like a competition or something. It’s a descriptive label.
The whole Pluto thing taught us a lot about the psychology of letting go of something taught at a young age. People getting proper frothing at how they shoulda just let Pluto keep it, just to save themselves the extremely minor cognitive dissonance.
When people get upset about pluto, I’ll just tell them if pluto is planet, so is Ceres. Which then results in mindless staring because they never even heard about Ceres…
And Cedna. And Eris. And Makemake. And Haumea. And…
Yeah. Removing pluto was the more conservative option.
truly it was. still workin on it tho
There are about 200 of these space objects that are roughly the size of Pluto.
So either we live in an 8 planetary system, or a 200+ planetary system. But it will never be 9 again.
I really doubt more than .001% actually care if it’s called a planet or not, it’s just a meme to pretend that you care. Like pineapple on pizza.
No one actually cares if you put pineapple on pizza. No one actually cares about Pluto being a planet. But there are many people who see themselves as some sort of white knight defenders of the truth against haters that don’t actually even exist.
I care if you put pineapple on pizza. Please put it on yours. Please. That means less on mine. Not that i dislike it, i just lack the parts to digest it properly.
Pineapple digests you before you digest it!
precisely
Have you seen the lengths people go to in order to not have to change their world view even a smidge? To not have to correct themselves about anything at all? I’ll give you a hint, literally every right wing party in the world doing well is because weak people can’t change a damn thing about themselves.
“World view” is very fitting here.
Not just the right. The entire Taiwan situation is entirely due to the Chinese being taught at school that Taiwan just is part of China like it’s an immutable fact.
being taught at school that Taiwan just is part of China
What’s the name of Taiwan’s government again?
China 2 Tawainese Boogaloo
Can’t tell if you’re joking or just a dickhead tankie.
Is it dickish to point out even Taiwan calls itself The Republic of China?
And China calls itself the People’s Republic of China. Which means China on its own does not exist.
Which means The Republic of China is not part of The People’s Republic of China.
Now get your semantic ass out of here.
This isn’t semantics, the “China” they’re referring to is the same place, both governments claim to be the legitimate ruler of all of China, It’s not “The Republic of One Little Island off China” and “The People’s Republic of All of China Except That One Little Island”.
Look at a map of their claimed territories, they’re 95% identical.
Because they consider themselves to be the original China, since their government was formed from the Nationalist (pre-communist) government of China, who were chased out by the Communists.
The situation is NOT like this:
🇨🇳: The island of Taiwan is part of me!
🇹🇼: No, I am an independent nation!It’s like this:
🇨🇳: I am the true China, and the island of Taiwan is part of me!
🇹🇼: No, I am the true China, and the mainland is part of me!Which is why there are some countries that do not recognize the People’s Republic of China (mainland), and instead recognize the Republic of China (Taiwan) as China.
My information from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retreat_of_the_government_of_the_Republic_of_China_to_Taiwan
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/feat/archives/2016/12/04/2003660529Sounds like tankie nonsense.
Are you sure Taiwan hasn’t been an independent state with nothing to do with China forever, and China just wants to invade because its an evil dictatorship?
Amen.
I always suspected that the discussion about letting Pluto stay a planet is especially relevant in the US since Pluto was the only planet to be discovered by US scientists … so it’s a point of national pride.
It’s likely most of us Americans don’t know about this fun fact.
I’ve certainly not seen anyone frothing at the mouth about it in the francosphere. It’s a non-subject, we just updated our textbooks and moved on. Whereas in English-speaking media even reasonable actors mentioning Pluto in passing will pointedly remark on its status one way or another. Americans won’t admit it but the only reason that’s a thing is chauvinism.
It’s funny how being bilingual one spots a lot of small semantic or cultural differences that amount to large paradigm shifts between languages. Like how most French people were taught the hydrocution myth (swimming after a meal supposedly being deadly), older Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping, and English speakers associate vanilla flavour with blandness because of the (English-specific) synonym even though the flavor itself is very powerful and no less overused than e.g. strawberry flavoring.
What’s less funny is how when you point out such a difference some people get Big Mad about it because they can’t admit that some core belief from their childhood is actually a specific sociolinguistic quirk not shared by the rest of the world. People get tribal about the weirdest, most inconsequential shit.
Koreans believe fans to be dangerous to use while sleeping
tbf i believe that too (but about ACs and not fans) and i’m not korean. the reason i believe this is because of my real-life experiences. When AC is running, it typically gives me the sensation that the air it gives off is not just cold, but creepy cold, like an iron rod is not just hard, but hard enough to smash somebody’s skull with it. The same intensity is the coldness from the typical ACs that i’ve experienced. At least some of them.
That’s just because it’s dry by nature. Monitor your indoors humidity and adjust accordingly with a humidifier.
I’d agree with you but the definition is arbitrary and is not of Natural Kind. Even worse, instead of making the definition of a planet more clear it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.
Honestly, if they just went with defining ‘Major Planets’, ‘Minor Planets’, and asteroids determined by mass and spherical shape, I think everyone would’ve moved on by now.
it just makes the determining what is a planet more difficult.
If this is true, then please tell me what totally non-arbitrary reason there was for Ceres to not be universally considered a planet?
I’m not sure what you mean. It should be a planet by the definition I gave before unless I didn’t convey what I was trying to say correctly. It’s definitely large, heavy, and spherical enough to be a planet in my opinion.
There’s tons of different sized objects in our solar system and it’s distinguishable enough to qualify in this one.
well guess which Moon is also pretty close in size to Mercury
Is it the sun?
Yes. Everyone knows the order goes:
Sun, Sun sized Mercury that laughs at all the little planets, Venus, etc.
I guffawed at this comment
What is yer mum’s bare arse, Trebek!
The one all the cheese comes from?
The answer is obviously Titan
The one that David Bowie’s son did a documentary about?
People fighting for Pluto that it should be a planet instead of a dwarf planet
Ceres: 🥺
Context: Ceres is now considered a dwarf planet, and used to be considered just an asteroid, but when it was first discovered it was considered a planet. That was in 1801. There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t. Like a lot of things in nature, things just exist, and as humans we categorize them. Ceres is round like a planet like Pluto. I’m not saying it should be considered a planet, I think dwarf planet fits them both nicely. As late as the 1950s Ceres was still sometimes considered a planet by some people.
I have a sort spot for it. I love it.
Edit: Because two people have misunderstood me now I’m going to say it more explicitly. I’m fully aware there is a scientific definition for dwarf planets. I’m not saying there isn’t. I’m just saying compared to something else like prime numbers there isn’t an obviously correct way to categorize them and the definition has changed over time. By stating the current definition of planets and/or dwarf planets you’re missing my point. Those definitions change. See here for the history.
I’m fighting for jupiter to also be a dwarf planet because it has not cleared its orbit of a few million asteroids.
All those asteroids are cqptured in Jupiter’s Trojan points, no?
*Lagrange points
You do have a point
I found it interesting that Warframe, set in the Solar System (+ SciFi/Fantasy stuff) features not only the various planets (including Pluto), but also moons (Deimos, Phobos, Europa) and dwarf planets (Ceres, Eris, Sedna) and even an asteroid (though the original name isn’t known, if it ever had one). Not relevant to the topic, just came to mind.
Most of my space knowledge comes from Elite Dangerous lol. They used a lot of real star catalogs when making the galaxy and visually it’s really good.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t
There are - exactly three.
- is in orbit around a star,
- has sufficient mass to assume hydrostatic equilibrium (a nearly round shape), and
- has “cleared the neighbourhood” around its orbit.
The last one means that its gravitational pull has removed any smaller objects that might be in its orbit, either by kicking them out of it, or by catching them as moons.
Pluto’s orbit is full of debris.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t. Like a lot of things in nature, things just exist, and as humans we categorize them.
You’re the second person to ignore the sentence immediately following that.
Because that sentence doesn’t really make sense. “Criteria” is a human concept. Nature doesn’t do “criteria”, nor “objective” for that matter. So, yes, there’s no “natural criteria” for when something is X or Y, we, humans, make those criteria. Doesn’t matter if it’s in relation to animals, plants, or planets.
So you’re saying things just exist, and as humans we categorize them? Because that’s what I said.
The idea of a “category” is inherently human. Just like “objective” and “criteria”.
Which means there is objective criteria for what is categorised as a planet - it’s whatever we, humans, define them to be.
Not objective in the sense that aliens would come to the same definition for what is and isn’t a planet. Compare that to something like what the elements are.
The scientific community was basically backed into a corner: either create a new category for Pluto and similar bodies, or we go from 9 planets to over 3,000 (iirc), lol.
The only sensible choice was made, imo.
it blew my tiny mind when i found out that there are multiple dwarf planets in long solar orbits in our system
they might be small and enjoy solitude but why are we forgetting about them???
and now apparently there’s also a dwarf planet in the inner solar system that nobody talks about??? rude
there’s also a dwarf planet in the inner solar system
It’s arguable about whether it’s in the “Inner Solar System”. Ceres is inside the asteroid belt, and the asteroid belt is the separator between the inner and outer system. It’s like floating in the middle of The Rhine and debating whether you’re in Germany or France
Exactly! It’s right there past Mars! It’s not like it’s some weird thing off in the cold dark past Pluto.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t.
There is, though, or rather there should be another one.
The official definition says
But I also said,
Like a lot of things in nature, things just exist, and as humans we categorize them.
There is no objective criteria for what a planet is and isn’t.
There is, though, or rather there should be another one.
The official definition says it’s a planet if it’s big enough to be round, which IMHO is a bullshit definition because nobody cares whether your object’s round, as in, for practical settlement purposes.
What’s important though is that it’s large enough to hold an atmosphere (at least if it had one). That’s only the case if the gravitational field is strong enough, which is the case roughly for objects of mass starting at around 10^23 kg. That definition fits surprisingly well the current actual classification of what is a planet and what isn’t, though.
Edit: I want to elaborate a bit more on this. Basically, if you consider a planet that has an atmosphere, like Earth, you see that the atmospheric density/pressure decreases exponentially with height. The concept of Scale Height discusses this: The atmosphere decreases exponentially, but if you take the total mass of the atmosphere and divide it by the density of the atmosphere at sea level, you get a height. That means, if the atmosphere had constant density up to that limit height and then cut off to zero, it would have the same mass as the actual atmosphere has. For Earth, that atmospheric scale height is about 8 km, about as high as the highest mountains on Earth btw.
The same concept of a scale height also exists for the gravitational field. Planets have a gravitational potential, which is formally the integral of the gravitational acceleration from ground to infinitely far-away. But you can simplified imagine it as: If the gravitational field would be constant up to a limit height and then would cut off to zero, that’s the scale height. For Earth, that gravitational scale height is about 8000 km, or about 1000x the atmospheric scale height.
The consequence of that is that Earth can hold an atmosphere neatly. Because for every gas molecule in the atmosphere, it is affected by the field of gravity strongly enough to be certainly bound to Earth. We take that as a granted, but consider this:
If the atmospheric scale height of another, fictional planet, was also 8 km but its gravitational scale height was only 4 km, then that would mean that a large part of the atmosphere would be exposed to being above-the-cutoff-height for gravity, so it would be effectively un-affected by gravity and would float away freely from the planet. This would actually not only imply that the planet would lose half of its atmosphere, but all of it. This is because, when the planet loses half its atmosphere, the atmospheric scale height actually doesn’t decrease at all. This is because it’s not like the atmosphere becomes less high, instead it just becomes half as thick everywhere. That also includes the ground level. So you have half the total mass of the atmosphere, but also half the thickness on ground level, so if you divide this, it’s still the same atmospheric scale height (!). This would mean that again, half of it would be above the gravity field and would escape again, and this process would repeat indefinitely until the planet has lost practically all of its atmosphere. Thus the planet could not hold an atmosphere.
That’s why there’s an important relationship between the gravitational potential of a planet and the fact whether the planet can hold an atmosphere at all. This isn’t just about how big the atmosphere can be in total, but whether there’s any atmosphere at all. Below a certain minimum planet mass, that’s completely impossible. Above, it’s possible.
The official definition says it’s a planet if it’s big enough to be round, which IMHO is a bullshit definition because nobody cares whether your object’s round, as in, for practical settlement purposes.
That’s the second out of the three points of the definition.
As to why it’s not bullshit - the roundness is a byproduct of the object achieving hydrostatic equilibrium (which is the actual criterion, not roundness).
What’s important though is that it’s large enough to hold an atmosphere (at least if it had one).
Define an atmosphere. Because there’s multiple asteroids that technically have one, albeit extremely thin ones. And be careful about being too nitpicky, as Mercury’s atmosphere is just it’s rock being vaporized due to its proximity to the sun
Because there’s multiple asteroids that technically have one, albeit extremely thin ones.
can you please link an example?
on that site i found this:
but no other mention of air or atmosphere on that object.
oh wait maybe you’re talking about something like this:
yeah, no, i don’t consider that an atmosphere. it’s individual molecules bouncing around, but they don’t fulfill the “statistical” character of gases.
And of course, scientists often just use the non-dimensional number characterizing this; gravitational scale height divided by the atmospheric scale height is the Gandolfi number (Gf). :-)
Gandolfi number (Gf). :-)
wait, fr?
No, and I screwed it up! Should have been the Gandalfi Number
i mean if it doesn’t exist yet, i’m glad to be the first to write a paper about it and have it be named after me or sth ;-)
Git Gud Ganymede, break out of Jupiter’s orbit
Gas giants aren’t planets: they’re just clouds, man.
Space clouds.
The sun is just a particularly angry cloud.
More like a failure as a sun. We should all point and laugh at Jupiter.
Failed stars
Well … what planet does Mercury orbit? Oh … yea, then its not a moon.
*yeah. Not yea or nay. It isn’t a vote.
From google: “yea is the word we sometimes use for yes, yay is the word we use to express joy, approval, or excitement.” From Grammarly: “you can use yea or yeah for yes”
If your going to be a weird-ass internet grammar nazi then at least be right about the grammar, otherwise you look like a total and complete idiot. That’s my vote.
Every voice vote I’ve ever had the honor of participating in, Aye is the word we used. As in “All in favor say Aye. All against say Nay”
Yea, I can’t say that “yea” or “yeah” is a hill worth dying on these days. So yeah…That’s how I see it. (Anybody see my Oxford comma? I had it here somewhere)
Literally means figuratively, whatever fight this guy is trying to carry on — he loses against the general ignorance of the masses. Evrytim.
Signed, guy who hates that literally means figuratively.
It doesn’t
You’re right, yet many people still say ‘literally’ immediately before saying something figurative.
Colloquialisms are king, you will always lose to the masses — in this case they happen to be very ignorant.
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New York City born and raised.
I distinctly remember a third grade class when the teacher told us that the population nation of Sweden was smaller than the population of New York City.
Nobody does indignation like a 9 year old.
If you’re only counting New York City proper this is true, but the New York City metro area vastly out populates the entire nation of Sweden. (20M vs 10M)
iirc it was NYC 8 mllion and Sweden 7.5 million. No idea what her source was.
Meanwhile Jupiter-san gets all the titles and meteor hugs
I mean jupiter-chan is humongous:
poor Flat(-chested) Earth…
Wait, YOU’RE the artist? This is incredible
no, just posting a old meme that has way to many itterations xD (and i know to much of it xD)
search for earth-chan, moon-chan, black-hole-chan etc. and rejoice
hahaha oh my god
I don’t like the format generally, so I never thought I’d appreciate a kawaii-anime-style narration with interesting facts about planets, yet here we are. Where’d you get them from? Or are you drawing them yourself?
😳 don’t like the format?! Nani?
Not a fan of the general visual language and style of anime and manga. I’m happy for all who enjoy it, it’s just not my taste.
pog
it’s a 8-10 year old meme, everything started with earth-chan, but then people illustrated the whole solar system*, the BSApricot illustrations are my favorites from the format
*and other things like black-hole-chan, universe-chan or principal milkyway
Mercury used to be bigger than it currently is. The only thing that’s survived the wrath of The Sun is its core.
Mercury is hard core.
please don’t remind me, 1991 was only so long ago.
I love how i get knowledgeable stuff under such memes
Best part of lemmy
“Moon” is more an indictment of the mediocre fusion product of the mass being orbited than any statement about the orbiter.
Damn, shots fired!
Don’t take Mercury for granted.
This is how we lost Pluto to the “well ackchually” gang.
Planet is just not a very useful distinction. Like, Mercury, Mars, Ceres and Ganymede have more in common with each other than Jupiter or Neptune.
I think “Planet” should be a gravitationally rounded mass that’s not a star anyway. Those can be divided into rocky and gaseous, and further divided by principal composition.
Smaller than that isn’t usually worth having a name, but moons can be just as interesting as free orbiting planets.
The distinction between minor and major planets is decently clear in our star system, but if we define it poorly it won’t help us understand other systems or why the major ones are important. It’s definitely not enough to disqualify minor planets from being full planets though. Go ahead and declare 8 major planets arbitrarily, but don’t try to justify ignoring the other few dozen planetoids poorly.
That would make Earth-Moon a binary planet. Which I’m cool with, actually.
The barycenter of the Earth-Moon system sits well within Earth’s radius. There is no definition under which the Earth-Moon system is considered binary
The barycentre of Sun-Jupiter system is outside of the Sun half the time. It’s a really bad metric for determining that, as it depends on the distance between two bodies and not just on their relative masses.
Except Jupiter is very clearly not a star. It’s an order of magnitude off of the mass required for fusion.
Who said anything about fusion? I thought the only thing that matters is the position of the barycentre, as you insisted?
You seriously can’t really be this fucking stupid. Am I getting punked?
but don’t try to justify ignoring the other few dozen planetoids poorly.
There’s 200+ kuiper belt objects that are large enough to be spherical, and most don’t have names
200+ dwarf planet candidates. Lots of them have very low densities, and most are too far away to know hardly anything about them. Pluto was only confirmed to be in hydrostatic equilibrium with New Horizons, and Quaoar has a Dwarf Planet name, but probably isn’t in hydrostatic equilibrium.
It’s not the specific bodies I’m worried about, it’s a useful idea of a planet. Finding dozens or hundreds more of them should be exciting, not a reason to throw up our hands and disqualify them.
Can’t have cleared your orbit around the sun if you don’t orbit the sun.
