Pluto

My first post in this thread was an article that does a good job of explaining why Pluto isn't a planet.

I was raised in my early years thinking it was a planet to and if it depresses you that it no longer is, don't be a scientist.

The thing about science is it's subject to change based on new evidence and empirical observation. It isn't like religion, which I personally view as dogmatic philosophy (most of the time). Even then it's not changed willy-nilly....it takes years of arduous research and peer-reviewing to change something that was previously thought of as fact, and that's just hypotheses; if you want to change a theory or mathematical theorem, you better have some damn good smoking-gun evidence.

Esper said:

If I'm not mistaken it was a radioisotope of plutonium. :)



I'm not sure what mental health has to do with any of this. Do you mean about people thinking Pluto is a planet and then suffering mental health issues because it was changed to a dwarf planet? I'm sorry if that's the case, but I don't think many people are going to be suffering because of that, and if they are then I hope they seek help.

Also, again, Pluto - whether you think of it as a planet or dwarf planet - is not a star, never was a star, and never will be a star.

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Thanx, I did. Sorry, it was a figure of speech, but for me it was shocking. Thanx for telling me that it's a dwarf planet: Achromatic and Esper.

Lotus the Cat said:

Can't tell if serious...? A planet would never be reclassified as a star unless the original classification was way off mark. Stars are balls of nuclear fusion, planets are not.

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Way off mark? Actually, at about 13–75 Jupiter masses you get what's called a brown dwarf, which can fuse deuterium but not hydrogen, and there isn't yet a consensus on how to define these as it's uncertain how exactly they form. Suffice to say, the planet-star division is spectral rather than boolean.

Cassino said:

Way off mark? Actually, at about 13–75 Jupiter masses you get what's called a brown dwarf, which can fuse deuterium but not hydrogen, and there isn't yet a consensus on how to define these as it's uncertain how exactly they form. Suffice to say, the planet-star division is spectral rather than boolean.

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True, however this is only the case as the definition of a brown dwarf has not been fully agreed upon - whether it can only be classified as such where there is evidence that fusion has occured at some point in its history. Seems a little odd to classify something as a "star" where nuclear fusion has not been shown to have occured or be underway, however. Otherwise, extremely large gas planets may be classified in this way, which seems too murky. The main linking characteristic of all the star classifications is nuclear fusion, so regardless of the indecisive classifications of brown dwarf stars at this stage, I stand by my original comment.

Esper said:

It's not a planet.

The New Horizons spacecraft is due to pass by Pluto in less than a week. (Expected to flyby on Tuesday, July 14 at 11:49:57 UTC). It will be the first time that we'll get close enough to see the dwarf planet in good detail and study its composition. Currently, thanks to New Horizons, the best images we have of Pluto are these:

Spoiler:

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What do you think of all this? What do you expect or hope we'll learn from this flyby? What do you think of these long-term space exploration endeavors? What about the future of space exploration? Just anything about space and planets and stuff.

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I love subjects like these. I hope there's something interesting for us to see on Pluto. Such as what it's made of and what it actually has on it. I'm very hopeful about the future of spacecraft and extraterrestrial colonization, as we'll probably be needing it hahaha. The more we know about the universe we live in, the better.