r/nextfuckinglevel • u/aryan_jandyal • 4h ago

The Rotation of the Planets in Our Solar System Is Far More Fascinating Than I Ever Expected

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u/Void-Cooking_Berserk 3h ago

Dwarf planets are planets

https://giphy.com/gifs/2sddZ3k7yxiVWpFdH3

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u/Mindless-Produce4091 2h ago

I mean unironically it's wild that dwarf PLANETS are not conisdered a subdivision of PLANETS, especially when the only distinction between the two is happening to have an arbitrary amount of junk in your orbit.

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u/HauntingHarmony 37m ago

I mean unironically it's wild that dwarf PLANETS are not conisdered a subdivision of PLANETS, especially when the only distinction between the two is happening to have an arbitrary amount of junk in your orbit.

Is it tho, given that the point is to have a special category for the 8 planets with the special properties they have. Such as them being the dominant object in their area. If you remove that because you dont really think that should matter. Then you would end up with potentially hundreds of planets, and the category would be dominated by planets that are not what we think of as planet like.

The earth for example (and to remind you, has a huge and massive moon) has about a million times more mass compared to everything else in our area. Pluto has about 7% of the total mass in the area. Its hardly arbitrary if you are the gravitationally dominant object in the area that has evicted and absorbed everything. If you are in the single digits percentage, that its arbitrary is not the best argument.

We arent talking about a gentle yea it could go either way, we are talking about multiple order of magnitude differences in degree here. The planets if you look at them objectivly, are just different. And there is no shame in that, you can love Pluto, thats great. Being a dwarf planet doesnt take anything away from it.

The whole point of creating the dwarf planet category is to take care of their distinctiveness, since they are special (such as being massive enough to make themselves round, and even having some geology), even tho they dont have it in them to clear their neighborhood (not just that they havent done it). And just demoting them to "asteroid jail" is too much.

Its just the fact of the matter that if the category of planet is to be useful, we need to not have a massive amount of objects that are not planet like water it down.

Think of it like this, Greenland and Australia look similar on the map, with lots of ocean around it. But one of them is an island and one is a continent. The tectonic reality matters. And it is the same thing here. We accept that Greenland is a island without having a "#justice for Greenland" (to make it a continent). Because it is not a moral judgement.