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• shneancy@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  i’ve spent 25 years on this blue marble fascinated by space, and only recently discovered there multiple long orbit dwarf planets going around the sun??? that is so cool why is this not widely known!

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  • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Well, it is widely know.

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• mnemonicmonkeys@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  It’s been like that for decades to be honest. Ceres used to be called a planet, but you don’t see anyone complaining about it’s demotion

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• ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Unpopular opinion: dwarf planets are cool.

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• IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  but so not?

  we used to have a handful of elements, but when we kept discovering more, we didn’t change the rules to have elements, and “steange elements” so schools only have to teach about 16 elements.

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  • umbraroze@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Well elements are elements. All of them are just protons and neutrons and electrons at the end of the day. They have different properties but all of them behave by the same rules.

    But there’s some big differences between the various kinds of bodies orbiting the Sun and how they’re orbiting the Sun. Big asteroids were considered planets, until we discovered there’s a shitload of them and they’re all in roughly the same area. When it turned out Pluto is basically in the same situation and there’s a lot more of the transneptunian objects, it was pretty clear that Pluto isn’t special. If you compare it to planets it’s pretty weird. But I think it’s good that they created the dwarf planet classification because that also elevated Ceres back, hell yeah.

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    • IAmNorRealTakeYourMeds@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      I’d rather we have dozens of planets, with news articles talking about “new planets discovered”

      we can still teach the handful of “classical planets”, so we can have posters, or have like periodic tables, and everyone be aware that they might go out of date as more is discovery.

      the solar system will be more exciting and more varied.

      also, the “clearing orbit from similar objects” is time and orbit dependent,

      larger orbits take longer to clear, which mean in a few billion years ceres might eject pluto and become a planet?

      or we could have gas giants beyond pluto (like this hypothetical 9th planet ) which it would be unlikely it has cleared its orbit, so we could have a planet larger than Jupiter which we would call a planet, but if we discover another planet in its orbit (too large to clear), then we will have to say that it is a dwarf planet.

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      • squaresinger@lemmy.world ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        The main issue here is that everything from a speck of dust to the massive black hole at the centre of the galaxis is pretty much the same thing on a large spectrum.

        You can clearly say that some grains of dust are something entirely different than a supermassive black hole, but it’s really hard to find solid cut-off points to categorize anything in between.

        So we started with a handful of arbitrary examples for each category, which was easy when we only had these examples, but with more and more discoveries the gaps between these examples are filled and it becomes a spectrum, and then it becomes iffy what exactly fits into which category.

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  • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’s all just made up categorization. It’s like that because astronomers have agreed to categorize them like that.

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