{"id":114631,"date":"2016-02-09T18:07:05","date_gmt":"2016-02-09T18:07:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/02\/09\/prokopetz-pairinstability-ma-wile\/"},"modified":"2016-02-09T18:07:05","modified_gmt":"2016-02-09T18:07:05","slug":"prokopetz-pairinstability-ma-wile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/02\/09\/prokopetz-pairinstability-ma-wile\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

prokopetz<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

pairinstability<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

ma-wile<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

pairinstability<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Remember kids: Pluto is not a planet, WAS never a planet, and any acknowledgement of Pluto as a planet was an error of assumption<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Fuckihg fight me right now viva la Pluto<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

F u c k you it was a clerical error!! The real ninth planet is out there but it\u2019s not Pluto! Stop ruining science!!!!<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

A clerical error? Oh, no – the truth is far more absurd.<\/p>\n

(Hold on, folks – this requires a bit of background.)<\/p>\n

In a nutshell, since the late 19th Century, it had been suspected
\nthat there was a ninth planet, based on apparent irregularities in the
\norbit of Uranus. This as-yet-hypothetical planet, whose gravitational
\ninfluence would have accounted for those irregularities, was termed
\n\u201cPlanet X\u201d.<\/p>\n

The trouble is, nobody could find the thing, no matter how
\nhard they looked. That seemed to have changed in 1930, when a new moving
\n object was finally detected on the outskirts of the Solar system. When
\nword of this discovery got out, the media declared that Planet X had
\nbeen found, and the object was subsequently named \u201cPluto\u201d.<\/p>\n

However, there was a problem with the newly dubbed Pluto: its faint
\nalbedo and lack of a visible disk suggested that it was much too small
\nto be Planet X. In fact, while school textbooks treated the matter as
\nresolved, the truth of the matter is that we had no idea what
\n Pluto was – we didn\u2019t even know for sure whether it was a planet at
\nall, much less that it was Planet X. Though little reported-on by the
\nmainstream press, the search continued.<\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t until 1992 that data from the Voyager flyby of
\nNeptune revealed that prior estimates of the masses of the outer planets
\n had been slightly out of whack. With the corrections enabled by Voyager, the apparent anomaly in Uranus\u2019 orbit was proven to be a math error: there was no Planet X after all.<\/p>\n

So what the hell was Pluto?<\/p>\n

Eventually, it was determined that Pluto had less than 0.2% of its
\ninitially estimated mass, and that its appearance near the predicted
\nposition of Planet X\u2019s orbit was just a bizarre coincidence. In spite of
\n this, it retained its provisional planetary status; it had already captured the public\u2019s imagination, and the fact that Pluto
\n was the only \u201cplanet\u201d to have been discovered by an American created
\nenormous political pressure against classifying it as anything else.<\/p>\n

This would remain the status quo until the discovery of additional
\nouter-Solar-system objects as large or larger than Pluto in the mid 00s –
\n most notably Eris – forced the classification issue to be resolved.<\/p>\n

TL\/DR version: Pluto was never uncontroversially classified as a
\nplanet in the first place. It just happened to coincidentally be near
\nthe orbit of a hypothetical ninth planet that was later proven not to
\nexist, and sort of inherited the planetary status of its phantom sibling
\n on a provisional basis due to a combination of institutional inertia
\nand politics.<\/p>\n

(As icing on the cake, at the time of this posting, early 2016, there\u2019s new – albeit controversial – evidence that there really is<\/b> a mysterious ninth planet lurking out there. Note, however, that this conjecture is based on a completely different set of anomalies from the ones that led to the Planet X hypothesis.)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

prokopetz: pairinstability: ma-wile: pairinstability: Remember kids: Pluto is not a planet, WAS never a planet, and any acknowledgement of Pluto as a planet was an error of assumption Fuckihg fight me right now viva la Pluto F u c k you it was a clerical error!! The real ninth planet is out there but it\u2019s … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[261,1506,185,1344,4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114631"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=114631"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/114631\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=114631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=114631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=114631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}