Re: Sky and Tel and why letters are sometimes unimportant and misleading

Rich wrote:
Letters to the ed. favour keeping Pluto as a planet by 80% or something
like that.
Either this is a highly skewed sample of the general opinion, or it's
proof people only write letters
when they feel incensed. I'd hate to think 80% of Sky and Tel's
readers are old, nostalgic dummies who act emotionally rather than
think rationally.
The demotion of Pluto was not an attack on Tombaugh. He had no idea
what he was really looking at, nor did anyone else up until recently.
Any real attack on Tombaugh for not understanding the true nature of
Pluto would be like attacking some guy from the 1880s who skimmed over
3C273 thinking, "Ah, a little blue star..."


I wish people would drop the ad hominem attacks.

The IAU decision was made by just a relatively few astronomers (several
hundred as I recall). Such a change should've been made by at least a significant number of astronomers, IMHO. Perhaps a mailed ballot to IAU membership would be in order.

There's a lot of dissension over definitions of planets, stars, etc
(fusors, planemos, brown dwarfs, etc). There are objects that appear to
be planet class masswise, but don't orbit any stars (and have their own
satellite systems). Seems likely that nature has produced a nearly continuous
spectrum of masses for objects. The IAU definition (although supposedly limited
to just our own solar system) seems to be lacking, especially if one does extend it to other solar systems (spherical -- just how spherical? ellipticity of what level will be accepted? dynamic clearing -- some young systems seem likely to have jupiter-class objects that haven't finished clearing their orbits; besides, just how clear is clear? Earth still has a class of Atens floating about its orbit, perhaps Earth isn't a planet?). My point here is that there isn't likely to be a good, clean definition of a planet. It'll necessarily have arbitrary cutoffs.

Personally, I have no problem with leaving Pluto in as a planet; Eris, too. That way we can have one planet for each finger! :)

Regards,
Dart
.

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