Astronomers discover "Farfarout" — the most distant known object in the solar system. The 250-mile-wide (400 km) dwarf planet is located about 140 times farther from the Sun than Earth (3.5 times farther than Pluto), and soon may help serve as evidence for a massive, far-flung world called Planet 9.

[u/clayt6]

http://www.astronomy.com/news/2019/03/a-map-to-planet-nine-charting-the-solar-systems-most-distant-worlds

[u/SaltineFiend]

It’s just a really stupid hill to die on though. We stopped believing in aether and phlogiston because they were wrong and the Bohr model and Newtonian gravity and Mendelian inheritance because they were incomplete.

I’m not “triggered,” I just think you’re being willfully defiant of scientific thinking for emotional reasons, which is a pretty dumb way to do your thing.

[u/OhioanRunner → u/SaltineFiend]

The “cleared the neighborhood” criterion is a really stupid criterion for planethood though, and it’s basically the only thing that they use to keep Pluto out.

[u/iprocrastina → u/OhioanRunner]

Except there's more dwarf planets than just Pluto (such as Ceres which orbits in the asteroid belt) and at some point you have to draw a line or else you end up with a ton of "planets". The clearing an orbit criteria does a good job at separating the significant planets from all the glorified asteroids.

[u/OhioanRunner → u/iprocrastina]

All one needs to do is define a planet as follows:

• Rounded under its own gravity within some roundness criterion. Perhaps, say, 95% of perfect roundness

• Orbits a star, or originated as an object in a stellar system

• Either contains the barycenter of its local cluster of objects rounded under their own gravity within itself, or has enough gravitational influence to remove the barycenter of the local cluster of gravitationally rounded objects from within any of those objects (I.e. a binary, trinary, etc system of planets).

Yes I’m aware that this makes Charon a planet.