x-cetra:rocketssurgery:Decided to make a handy graphic after seeing a lot of misinformation spread a

x-cetra:rocketssurgery:Decided to make a handy graphic after seeing a lot of misinformation spread around tumblr. Current science isn’t perfect and definitions are bound to change, but I wanted to push back against the hostile attitude against it because it seems like a lot of people are being hostile for the wrong reasons.Please let me know if there are any factual errors, thank you :)What breaks my heart is that because Pluto gets all the hype, nobody’s paying attention to the other dwarf planets which we are currently exploring and discovering!I mean, look.Eris and her moon Dysnomia: Wanna get mad? She was initially touted as “Planet X,” so the Palomar Observatory that discovered her named her Xena. That’s not actually a Greek or mythological name; it was invented for the TV series. So alas, the boring fuddy-duddy IAU gave her a traditional mythological name. But we know this is really a picture of Xena and Gabrielle. Right? Right! Eris is pretty much the same size as Pluto, although she may be more massive (a cannonball weighs more than a ball of wood the same size). Then there’s icy Haumea, which has the distinction of being the fastest-spinning large object in the solar system. That’s why it’s egg-shaped instead of spherical. It has at least two moons and debris around it.The chart above is missing yet another dwarf planet, Ceres.  The Dawn spacecraft has finished mapping Vesta (a protoplanet), and will be arriving at Ceres in April 2015, shortly before New Horizons reaches Pluto.What do you want to bet the Dawn Spacecraft mission to Ceres will get almost no news coverage, because everyone’s so emotionally attached to Pluto? Yet Ceres was discovered first!In fact, Ceres suffered exactly the same fate as Pluto. It was the first large body discovered between Mars and Jupiter (all the way back in 1801), so it was initially hailed as a planet. After Vesta and two other asteroids on the cusp of being protoplanets were discovered, astronomers realized there was an entire belt of asteroids out there, and Ceres was demoted. Except Ceres is not a normal asteroid. It’s too big, too round, and it’s differentiated into crust and core like a planet. So the “dwarf planet” category may be a demotion for Pluto, but it’s a well-deserved promotion for Ceres.More importantly, Ceres is in the asteroid belt rather than waaaay out near Neptune, so it’s a likely candidate for human exploration. Some of your grandchildren may be mining on Ceres. Let’s get excited for Ceres too, okay? As for moons: considering that Pluto’s extra moons have only been discovered in the past decade or so thanks to intense scrutiny as NASA prepares the New Horizons spacecraft to fly past it, it’s likely that many of the dwarf planets shown above have more moons that we can’t see. Also, these dwarf planets are so small, so dark, and so distant, with wildly eccentric orbits that are not in the flat plane of the rest of the solar system, that they’re incredibly hard to find. There’s more out there waiting to be discovered. Guaranteed. Probably hundreds. Some of you reading this post might be the people to discover them!Pluto is fantastic, and I’m on the edge of my seat waiting for the New Horizons Spacecraft to reach it. But for me, the thing that’s really important is Pluto is representative of a whole FLEET of remote worlds that are hard to see, hard to visit, hard to know. So this visit isn’t just about Pluto. It’s about learning from Pluto what all those other dwarf planets may be like.And that’s awesome. -- source link
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