HONK! Time for a new Pluto thread.

[hammegk]

Honk!!!

[Doctor X]

--J.D.

[Witness]

Pluto & Charon days (july 2015):





And some strange terrain:

[Doctor X]

--J.D.

[sparks]

Goddamned Awesome!

[hammegk]

Honk.

[Doctor X]

Goddamned Awesome!

Yes.

I am.

--J. אהיה אשר אהיה D.

[hammegk]

Goddamned Awesome!

Yes.

I am.

--J. אהיה אשר אהיה D.

Honk Honk Honk, fuckwit.

[Doctor X]

--J.D.

[Witness]

[no one in particular]

http://qz.com/632621/scientists-think-t ... [quote]You can see “an extremely bright low altitude limb haze … on the left” and “a discrete fuzzy cloud seen against the sunlit surface … on the right,” John Spencer at Southwest Research Institute pointed out to the New Scientist.

Those clouds are still speculations, but the possibility that the dwarf planet has a weather system has many scientists in a tizzy. If proven, these clouds could be the excuse needed to reinstate Pluto to the status of the ninth planet of the solar system. It was demoted by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to be a dwarf planet in 2006.[/quote]



Although I'm not sure what this is on about, since the word "cloud" doesn't even show up on the IAU wiki definition of a planet page.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IAU_definition_of_planet

[Witness]

Pluto’s ‘Halo’ Craters

Within Pluto’s informally named Vega Terra region is a field of eye-catching craters that looks like a cluster of bright halos scattered across a dark landscape.

Looks like a WWI battlefield (size apart).

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-s-halo-craters

[Witness]

This is the most detailed view of Pluto’s terrain you’ll see for a very long time. This mosaic strip – extending across the hemisphere that faced the New Horizons spacecraft as it flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015 – now includes all of the highest-resolution images taken by the NASA probe. With a resolution of about 260 feet (80 meters) per pixel, the mosaic affords New Horizons scientists and the public the best opportunity to examine the fine details of the various types of terrain on Pluto, and determine the processes that formed and shaped them.

The width of the strip ranges from more than 55 miles (90 kilometers) at its northern end to about 45 miles (75 kilometers) at its southern point. The pictures in the mosaic were obtained by New Horizons’ Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) approximately 9,850 miles (15,850 kilometers) from Pluto, shortly before New Horizons’ closest approach.

[youtube][/youtube]

[Anaxagoras]

Pluto might be a planet again. Let’s talk about why this matters.

HONK!!!

Prepare yourself—the Pluto debate has returned, and people are not going to be able to shut up about it. Pluto might be about to regain its planethood.

It might feel like scientists are jerking you around. A decade ago they all decided that Pluto wasn’t a planet—it was actually a dwarf planet—and now all of a sudden they want to change it back? Maybe you even think that this just goes to show how meaningless it all was to begin with. Planet, dwarf planet—it’s all a made-up system determined by some esoteric group anyway.

But categories do matter, and so do the definitions we use to arrive at those categories. The fact that people (even experts like the scientists at NASA) go back and forth on what definitions we should use doesn’t make them less meaningful. It just means that we’re still learning. That’s what science is all about: we have to be able to adjust our definitions to fit our understanding. And this whole Pluto business is a perfect example.

Let’s start with the basics. A group of scientists from NASA’s New Horizons mission, which did a flyby study of Pluto back in 2015, are planning on proposing a new definition of “planet” at the upcoming Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in March. They’re led by longtime Pluto advocate Alan Stern. Ever since the supposed ‘demotion,’ Stern and others have argued the Pluto is a planet while scientists in the opposite camp have criticized them for trying to bring back a simplistic view of our solar system. The new definition that Stern and his New Horizons colleagues are proposing would restore Pluto’s planet status, but it would also give many more objects in our solar system the "planet" designation. We would end up with 110 of them in total. And just think, you complained about the confusion of going from nine to eight.

The actual definition they’re proposing is “a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters.” In plain language, they suggest “round objects in space that are smaller than stars.”

This would make, I suppose, the moon a planet too? The moon is round. And it's actually bigger than Pluto. But not ones that are too lumpy.

[Witness]

This would make, I suppose, the moon a planet too? The moon is round. And it's actually bigger than Pluto. But not ones that are too lumpy.

I read (sorry, no ref., t'was a long time ago) one should consider the Earth/Moon system as a double planet.

Now from a pragmatic point of view, definitions/categories/classifications can be either limiting (e. g. racism, to take a very raw example, or the alchemists' concept of most metals as "sick gold") or productive (e. g. Linnaeus' binomial classification of all living thingies, nearly perfect to this day). And the Earth/Moon "double planet" is certainly different from the view of Earth with an isolated and unimportant Moon appendix: our Moon stabilizes Earth's axis (so we can enjoy reasonably mild seasons, or we probably wouldn't be here to talk about it) and there is a constant transfer of momentum Earth —> Moon which makes for ever longer days (~ 10 hours during the deep Precambrian), which is good for Pyrrho's bad days and Bruce's commutes.

[Abdul Alhazred]

It might feel like scientists are jerking you around.

At this point all it does is discredit science.

They aren't discovering anything new, merely arguing about how many angels etc.

[Witness]

[youtube][/youtube]

[Anaxagoras]

A 6-year-old tells NASA to make Pluto a planet again: ‘You need to fix this problem for me’



How could NASA be so heartless as to deny such a sincere request from a 6-year-old girl?



HONK!!!

[Abdul Alhazred]

Awwww.