Pluto's Floating Hills

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

 

http://www.nasa.gov/feature/pluto-s-mysterious-floating-hills

 

Because water ice is less dense than nitrogen-dominated ice, scientists believe these water ice hills are floating in a sea of frozen nitrogen and move over time like icebergs in Earth’s Arctic Ocean. The hills are likely fragments of the rugged uplands that have broken away and are being carried by the nitrogen glaciers into Sputnik Planum. ‘Chains’ of the drifting hills are formed along the flow paths of the glaciers. When the hills enter the cellular terrain of central Sputnik Planum, they become subject to the convective motions of the nitrogen ice, and are pushed to the edges of the cells, where the hills cluster in groups reaching up to 12 miles (20 kilometers) across.

 

Why the funk did we ever demote this amazing beauty of a planet

[(GigaDrillBreaker)]

Why the funk did we ever demote this amazing beauty of a planet

 

Because it is really small and its orbit is funked

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

Because it is really small and its orbit is funked

Hmm, yeah I guess. The third criteria for being a planet has plenty of problems already, but planet or not, Pluto was my childhood and is still not ceasing to amaze

[ihop]

tl;dr some cool natural phenomenon occurs on it therefore it should be a planet? At the end of the day it's still a rock with an irregular orbit in the middle of nowhere.

[Partangle the Candle Jangler]

Because it is really small and its orbit is fucked

 

But you fail to account for its beauty, clearly the most important characteristic to consider when determining whether or not something is a planet.

[(GigaDrillBreaker)]

Really though, the planet comment was clearly not the point of this.

 

This glacier frozen nitrogen floaty mountain sheet is honestly super cool. Cold places do cool things. On some moon or another, water/ice is the equivalent of lava/rock on earth. Really crazy how it scales.

[Susie]

Actually its still debatable as towards whether its in our solar system or not, some scientists consider it a part of our system while others dont. It is a planet, just a dwarf planet which is still basically a type of planet, just smaller.

 

Anyways yeah this floating hills thing is really cool, Pluto in general is a pretty cool planet, packs a lot of punch in its small size

[Ryusei the Morning Star]

tl;dr some cool natural phenomenon occurs on it therefore it should be a planet? At the end of the day it's still a rock with an irregular orbit in the middle of nowhere.

 

 

But you fail to account for its beauty, clearly the most important characteristic to consider when determining whether or not something is a planet.

I'm not sure if you're be sarcastic for the wit or really asking. But I'll take it as the latter:

 

Alan Stern: I think the IAU really embarrassed themselves with this. They created a problem for themselves and for astronomy. It [the definition] created an unworkable algorithm for deciding what's a planet and what's not.

 

After all, it produces patently ridiculous results, so people just move on. I see professional PhD astronomers refer to objects the IAU would not consider planets as planets all the time.

 

It shouldn't be so difficult to determine what a planet is. When you're watching a science fiction show like "Star Trek" and they show up at some object in space and turn on the viewfinder, the audience and the people in the show know immediately whether it's a planet, or a star, or a comet or an asteroid.

 

And that's at a moment's notice. They do not need to know things like, "What else is around it? And, let's see, we're going to integrate orbits, we're going to find out if it's cleared its zone, or it might some day, or maybe it could but it didn't." That's making something hard out of something easy, and it reflects poorly on astronomy and astronomers.

 

SPACE.com: One of your chief objections is the "clearing your neighborhood" stipulation. Under that definition, Earth wouldn't be a planet in some circumstances, right? 

 

Stern: That's an example of what's so ridiculous about it. Suppose that in your mind, you created a solar system exactly like ours, except at each of the orbits of the nine classical planets, you put an Earth. As you go further outward in the solar system, you cross a boundary where Earth is no longer able to clear its zone, because the zone is too big.

 

It turns out that happens around the orbit of Neptune, maybe Uranus. So you would have nine identical objects, six of which you would call a planet and three of which you would not. They're identical in every respect except where they are. [Top 10 Extreme Planet Facts]

 

In no other branch of science am I familiar with something that absurd. "We're going to call it a cow, except when it's in a herd." A river is a river, independent of whether there are other rivers nearby. In science, we call things what they are based on their attributes, not what they're next to.

 

And the IAU definition is even worse, because it produces different categorizations for identical objects, depending on where they are. Get this — Earth at the same distance from the sun [as Pluto] would not be a planet by the IAU’s measure, because Earth can’t clear that zone either. I would say any definition that produces a result where Earth is not a planet under any circumstance is immediately indicted as ridiculous, because one thing we all agree is a planet is planet Earth!

 

That's crazy. No wonder teachers and students are frustrated, confused, unhappy. It reflects poorly on astronomy, to have something so illogical.

 

SPACE.com: Why do people care so much about Pluto's status? Why do

 

- See more at: http://www.space.com/12710-pluto-defender-alan-stern-dwarf-planet-interview.html#sthash.q09rOvrw.dpuf

 

It was honestly me being more nostalgic than anything, but yeah mostly cause the 3rd Clause doesn't make sense. 

 

Giga nailed it though

[Cosmo.]

Scientist need to stop demoting Pluto, first they stop classifying it as a planet, now they even want to exclude it from the solar system?! What did this cool poor baby rock do to you? #VivaLaPluto

 

 

But this is seriously super cool, it's like a huge table of air hockey.