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10th Planet
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in General Chat
How rare There is officially a 10th planet apparantly. :shocking:
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Have a feeling "someone" may ve after more funding [/cynic]
there's a debate whether pluto is a planet or a moon aswell. certanly small enough to be a moon
and why dont they give the planet a proper name?
They may do eventually. All astronomers / space science type people have their own classification system for all objects in space, so they can keep track of them. All asteroids have a code name for example, like a kind of barcode. Otherwise it would be impossible to keep track of them all. Here they've just carried on with the procedure, but they may well name it after a greek or roman god or goddess. As far as I know some of the moons in the far space system were discovered and givven a dodgy name, then they named them after the sons/daughters of the planet or something along those lines. Look at Jupiter, Io (one of jupiter's moons) was one of his lovers.
The belt that both of these objects are part of is made up of 1000's of asteroids, and Pluto and the new planet are simply the largest found there.
However Pluto was declared a 'major planet' when discovered in the 1930s and despite constant debate on the issue (it's been claimed that if discovered now, Pluto would never have been called a planet) it's never been demoted to 'minor planet' status.
So this new planetish has kicked off the same debate again. Those who say Pluto is a planet have to accept this as a planet as well (it's larger and almost identical), those who say Pluto is just a minor planet will use this as an opportunity to downgrade Pluto and the new planet to minor planet status.
btw the real outrage is the naming - the American's are planning to call the new planet 'Xena', because - 'we always wanted to name something Xena'. If that's the best we can come up with for only the tenth discovered planet in our solar system then science is doomed.
Why do the Americans get to name it? They weren't the first observers of it... not as far as I know anyway.
That's true.
I say we call it "Aliens cross this and die." in honour of most films involving Aliens, and we set up a permenant military base on it. This could easily be the Republican's next election campaign, to prevent Islamic Aliens attacking us... :chin:
Either way, its fucking ace. Our Galazy grows in size!
Its always been growing in size since it came into being.
and there's one here from nature;
"Provisionally named 2003 EL61, it was first seen in 2003 by Jose-Luis Ortiz, an astronomer from the Institute of Astrophysics in Andalusia, Spain, and his colleagues. They used the Sierra Nevada Observatory in Granada, Spain, and observations this month confirmed its existence.
The object had also been spotted by a group at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, led by astronomer Mike Brown. They first saw it on 28 December 2004, hence its seasonal sobriquet.
"There's no question that the Spanish group is rightly credited with discovery," writes Brown on his website. "We could have announced the object earlier, but we took a chance that no one else would while we were awaiting our observations from the Spitzer Space Telescope. We were wrong!""
C'mon its better than naming it after Mickey Mouse's dog :thumb:
well, it was actually nicknamed santa.
Actually, I can't decide which would be worse...
mmmmm, if ya say so