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This far-flung orbit may be the result of an encounter with a giant planet, which ejected the candidate dwarf planet out of the solar system, say the researchers.
Poor guy. Hopefully he's out there finding his own family.
At least it doesn't have to deal with the toxicity Pluto does, being in the family one day and then coldly rejected from the family from the planet club the next. And we wonder why it's exterior is frozen...
Dwarf or not, Pluto is STILL a planet.
It's not, actually. "Planet" and "Dwarf planet" are disjoint sets, according to the IAU.
Is a sea lion still a lion? Same thing.
Well, screw the IAU. What the hell does "clearing your neighborhood" even mean?
It turns out that for all of these different methods, you will find an extremely clear bimodal distribution that groups the 8 planets together as being highly capable of clearing their orbits whereas everything else falls into a statistically distinct non-clearing group. This is because there's sound dynamic reasons for why objects would fall into one group or the other with nothing lasting long in the "grey area" between them. Once an object becomes significantly better than its orbital neighbors at clearing the neighborhood it snowballs due to the feedback loop of scattering or absorbing its neighbors into itself.
That makes this a good criterion for classification. As the old saying goes, "cleave nature at the joints."
There are so many nasty potential jokes I decided not to get involved. Fuck it I ain’t touching that with a 30-foot pole.
it means that either pluto isn't a planet, or basically the entire fucking asteroid belt it's part of is all planets
Jerry?
“The object is currently about 90.5 astronomical units (AU) away from us, or roughly 90 times as far from Earth as the sun is.”
This sentence pissed me off so much and I stopped reading after it.
It is 90.5 times as far from the Sun as the Earth is from the Sun. Why’d you have to go and change the frame of reference to Earth?
Well it's a good frame of reference because it's where most of us keep all our stuff.
Talk about putting all our eggs in the same basket smh
It didn't. It's 90.5 AU from us, and us is Earth. Or do you live on the Sun?
If we are 1AU from the sun, and this planet is 90AU from the sun, then it is between 89 and 91 AUs from earth depending on the progress of our orbits (assuming perfectly circular orbits). So they did change the frame of reference.
They didn't change the reference, they defined an AU.
I mean, they said "roughly".
Like, give or take one AU, throughout the year.
Fair, but annoying to the pendantic.
"It's 20.5°C outside or roughly 20 notches on your thermometer (except for americans)"
Here's another article that doesn't do this for anyone else that would prefer it:
https://phys.org/news/2025-05-extreme-cousin-pluto-dwarf-planet.html
Ugh, didn't read the "dwarf" part and got my hopes up for planet 9. When they eventually do find it they have to name it something with P so that the old mnemonics still work.
I've heard that the sign of a fair bargain is that everybody leaves unhappy. So how about we name it "Pluto?" That should annoy pretty much everyone.
"Plutwo"
“Planet 9” starts with “P”
This study authors btw say that their models for 2017 OF201's orbit work best without the influence of a hypothetical planet 9
Ooh, nice!
Obviously there's a Planet X out there, where else would Chemical X come from
They prefer to be called little planets, tyvm.
Pluto defenders in shambles
But I am not sure how to process this as a planet X fan
planet X
🪐Edit: Also, Pluto would totally whoop Planet X's ass one-to-one!
When we hit the floor you just watch them move aside
We will take them for a ride of rides
They all love your miniature ways
You know what they say about small boys
So, draft planet 8.1 ? 8.3 because of Pluto and Charron?
Don't forget Eris. Weighs more than Pluto.
Oh shit yeah… So, 8.4 then?
How do Sedna and that new one have a stable orbit? Are they that fast, to be able to compensate the movement of Pluto?
dibs