Thirteen Planets Orbit the Sun
Aerospace Monday, August 18, 2008 . This is a SciScoop post by David Bradley
By Sykes criteria, the smallest known planet in the solar system would be Ceres, the largest and most massive object in the asteroid belt. Ceres is less than half the diameter of Pluto.
Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute is talking about planets across the universe in general, about Pluto and other small
planets in particular, and about planets in the distant reaches of our solar system yet to be discovered. Some of those could even be as large
as the Earth, he claims.
RESOURCES
http://www.psi.edu/press/archive/20080812_planet_debate
- Astronomy planets solar system
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1 Response to Thirteen Planets Orbit the Sun
xtifr
August 22nd, 2008 at 6:58 pm
While this is better, in my opinion, than not classifying Ceres and Eris as planets, it still has at least one major flaw.
The problem with this definition is that it leaves us with no name for “rogue” spherical objects (those not orbiting any body at all, or those orbiting a cluster or galaxy rather than a particular star or planet).
The real problem is that we’re trying to merge two completely unrelated concepts (size and orbital properties) into a single word. This is silly. As far as I’m concerned, any definition which suggests that Mercury is more like Jupiter than it is like Ceres or Ganymede is a dumb definition. :)