this post was submitted on 28 Jun 2024
1712 points (98.3% liked)
People Twitter
5398 readers
1440 users here now
People tweeting stuff. We allow tweets from anyone.
RULES:
- Mark NSFW content.
- No doxxing people.
- Must be a pic of the tweet or similar. No direct links to the tweet.
- No bullying or international politcs
- Be excellent to each other.
- Provide an archived link to the tweet (or similar) being shown if it's a major figure or a politician.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Pluto being too small isn't actually the grounds on which it got demoted. The size requirement is just being massive enough to reach hydrostatic equilibrium - that is, be heavy enough that it's round. Pluto does meet this one
The one it fails is clearing its orbit. This basically means being much heavier than everything else in the same orbit. Be gravitationally in charge of your orbit. The other eight are all hundreds if not thousands of times heavier than everything else in their orbit (not including moons, since they're gravitationally bound to the planet anyway), whereas Pluto is less than a tenth of the total mass in its own orbit. Ceres is actually more gravitationally dominant over its orbit than that, although still nowhere near the eight planets.
This one sounds a bit weird at first, but I kinda like how it has such a massive delineation between the things we instinctively think of as planets and everything else.