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Post by Jarlaxle on Aug 24, 2006 20:49:35 GMT -5
I just heared this weird thing on the news today: The Scientific community has declared that pluto is longer considered a planet! They say this becasue the planet itself is not even as big as Earth's moon and it has a very obscure orbit. They are now thinking of calling it and any other planets like it "A Dwarf Planet".
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Post by buttonpresser4815 on Aug 24, 2006 21:17:16 GMT -5
Well that means that all those other objects aren't then. I've heard that it rotates around an object besides the sun, but they don't know.
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Post by Jarlaxle on Aug 24, 2006 21:22:01 GMT -5
That could explain its unusuall orbit. Perhaps it orbits to different gravitational forces at once.
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Post by The Overlord on Aug 25, 2006 3:03:50 GMT -5
Yeah, I've heard this yesterday, I was quite suprised too. Looks like there's only 8 "main" planets now.
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Post by evilcrash9 on Aug 25, 2006 20:29:18 GMT -5
So I could call Pluto....Gimli if I wanted to?
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Post by buttonpresser4815 on Aug 25, 2006 21:36:11 GMT -5
Yes.
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Post by evilcrash9 on Aug 25, 2006 21:37:40 GMT -5
life is good anyway did they find a planet X just to ask?
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Post by buttonpresser4815 on Aug 25, 2006 21:40:46 GMT -5
UBB103 or something, but they have no name. You can call it whatever you want.
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Post by Raistlin Majere on Aug 25, 2006 22:11:30 GMT -5
Little more can be said about Pluto's renaming, but I do have an interesting space-related topic: I have recently heard that theoretical physics suggests that the universe may not be infinite, it may not go on forever. They suggest that the universe is finite--it has an end at some point, perhaps like a globe itself, an immense sphere, perhaps. Of course it is only theoretical, but we are always learning more about what lies beyond our globe, we may find out.
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Post by Jarlaxle on Aug 26, 2006 21:40:50 GMT -5
It will be such a long time if ever when we find that answer.
What i also found strange was that on the news, there were 2 other planets which were previously labeled as dwarf planets before pluto was but were almost never mentioned. I remember one of them being named Xeena.
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Post by Raistlin Majere on Aug 28, 2006 22:24:39 GMT -5
Of course. But, in the end, what was gained by changing the name? Yes, the scientific community has managed to make their charting of the galaxy that much more complicated, but what benefit can be derived from having another classification for planet size? Personally, I find that any time spent looking into that issue was time wasted, time that should be spent discovering new things, developing technologies rather than renaming that which we already know exists.
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Post by Jarlaxle on Aug 29, 2006 21:11:31 GMT -5
Perhaps they are makeing the changes now because they have encountered at least 3 different planets like that and they might need a future classification if we discover more of them in other star systems.
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Post by Raistlin Majere on Aug 30, 2006 22:56:53 GMT -5
And what would calling a planet smaller gain? It would seem to me to be more important to find ANY planets or phenomena in space, not waste time giving special names to those of different sizes.
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Post by Jarlaxle on Aug 30, 2006 23:11:44 GMT -5
Most would agree with you but we can barely reach beyond our own solar system. They might just be planning for the future.
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Post by Raistlin Majere on Sept 1, 2006 22:56:43 GMT -5
Yes, but my question to you is what you think will be gained by re-naming the planet. If they are "planning for the future", how will the classification "small planet" help them, really?
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