does this count as a planet?

I think it's a car.

which one belongs to the little prince?

It's Planet X. Some critter from a Japanese monster flick is undoubtedly on it's way to eat us.

≡ Click to see image ≡

hey, what a bunch of crap. that image worked on preview.

ah crap, now my link to that image has been locked and you get a "you are forbidden" page. the link worked before.

today, as fridays go, sucks. sry

the image i tried to post. shit, it's not even that great, but it was a response to weretable.
≡ Click to see image ≡

Further proof of the oort region?

I wonder if the people who want to call it 2003 EL61 and the ones who want to call it K40506A will have to fight it out, steel-cage style. "Ultimate Fighting Astronomers--get it on pay-per-view!" I'd pay for that--from my years editing astrophyics, there are some astronomers I'd like to see with their teeth kicked in.

are people really questioning whether Pluto's a planet at all? they just said it on tv, and announced this one as definitely the 10th planet.

No, and we've known for ages that there is something much larger orbiting around the sun outside of pluto - as Pluto "wobbles" in it's orbit indicating a body as large as Venus may be tugging at it with their gravity. So is this EL61 thing that?

ahh. I find it amazing that the Sun can control something so far away, orbitwise, yet none of the planets are ever pulled in entirely. (but then i know nothing about physics)

Yes, Pluto's status has been questioned. Technically, the IAU (big worldwide committee of stargazer-types) gets to decide what is and isn't a planet, and with the increasing discovery of Pluto-alikes, it's getting harder to stick with the insistence that Pluto is and these other things ain't. A lot of the argument centers on the question of honoring Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1947 and died in 1997.

The bottom line is that the IAU really doesn't want to make a definition per se for what is a planet, other than "major object orbiting the sun". If you wanted to be liberal you could say that the IAU recognizes some 10,000 planets -- not counting asteroids with numbers only. In fact, there was some debate about giving Pluto an asteroid number, the symbolic 10,000, as it was reached (about 7 years ago). Then there was a debate about giving it the designation for Trans-Neptunian Object #1, being the first such discovered. In both cases it would remain considered a planet as well.

I'm not entirely happy with designating this new one the 10th planet, simply because I don't see the argument -- other than "it's bigger than Pluto" -- doesn't apply to other TNOs that are "almost as big as Pluto".

I strongly suspect that there's going to start to be some arbitrary clipping, such as "spherical objects of > 1000km diameter with a solar orbit".

Oh, and the wobble, dabitch, has been debated -- it may be instrumentation anomalies, too. EL61 is probably not the source, as most of the time it would simply be too far from Pluto to affect it. You may be thinking of the unanswered question of what causes the perturbations in the orbit of Neptune, which hasn't been satisfactorily answered. Yet.

ahh--thanks stil.

How was that guy able to discover Pluto, but not the other bigger things way out there? That seems weird to me.

10000 planets is an enormous amount tho...are there set rules about calling something a planet?

(and i hereby christen that 10th planet "MeCha")