Science changes its mind...

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B®ent

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LightHorseman said:
That, and Franco was a dictator who ruthlessly oppressed his opposition,

You mean the 'opposition' which slaughtered Priests and Nuns, and burned Catholic churches to the ground?

marginalised and brutalised minorities,

Yes, such as when he welcomed thousands of Jews into Spain to spare them persecution in Nazi France. :doh:

and was on first name terms with Hitler and his top staffers, so much so that the German Army virtually won the civil war for him.

That was well before anyone knew of Hitler's genocide. You should know this. Also, you should be aware that Franco (unlike Mussolini) refused to enact anti-Semitic policies in his country. He was a friend to the Jews.
 
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Deamiter

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Interestingly enough, the OP and all the subsequent responses missed a rather crucial fact:

There has never been and still is no "official definition" of planet OR moon!

Yes, popular culture says that there are 9 planets, but nobody's ever claimed that popular culture is infallable. Quite simply, it's nearly impossible to draw an arbitrary line, and recent attempts to do so are likely to contradict what popular cultue has "known."

Aside from the fact that this isn't a change within scientific circles (scientists know very well what each object is even if they can't agree on what to call them) it is indeed one of the major successes of science that it's willing to admit when our understanding of the universe is wrong. It's a far cry from some religious groups who claim (with neither Biblical nor traditional support) that their interpretation of the Bible must be correct or all of Christianity is bunk.

Even when scientists believe they are right, they are always expected to define an experiment or evidence that would prove them wrong. It's this acknowledgement that in the future, we may know more than we do now that makes the scientific method so successful. Of course, creationists carefully construct their arguments in such a way that there is no experiment or evidence that could possibly falsify them. If a hypothesis makes no useful predictions (and thus can't be falsified by testing those predictions) it must be right... right?*

*note: that last sentence is sarcastic.
 
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LightHorseman

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Wadsworth, there were probably people in 1924 who didn't like the idea of 9 planets. However, what people like rarely has any impact on scientific fact. People often find the idea of environmental degradation unsettling and wish it would just go away. This has little, if any, observable effect on reality though.
 
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LightHorseman said:
Wadsworth, there were probably people in 1924 who didn't like the idea of 9 planets. However, what people like rarely has any impact on scientific fact. People often find the idea of environmental degradation unsettling and wish it would just go away. This has little, if any, observable effect on reality though.

Yes, but in 1930 (where'd you get the 1924 date?) and many years thereafter, Pluto was presumed to be larger than we know it is today. I remember reading a book from the mid-1960s (and I still have this book in my possession) which portrayed Pluto as being roughly the same size as the Earth's moon. Now we know it is much, much smaller.
 
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LightHorseman

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Pluto was discovered in 1930, hence, in 1924 people probably had the figure 8 firmly etched into their minds.

Pluto and its satellite Charon have often been considered a binary planet because they are more nearly equal in size than any other planet/moon combination in the Solar System, and because the two bodies orbit a point not within the surface of either. Under the aforementioned planet definition proposal, since they orbit each other around a center of mass that is outside either body, they would be officially considered a binary planet system

Pluto's mass and diameter could only be estimated for many decades after its discovery. The discovery of its satellite Charon in 1978 enabled a determination of the mass of the Pluto-Charon system by simple application of Newton's formulation of Kepler's third law. Later, Pluto's diameter was measured when it was occulted by Charon, and its disc can now be resolved by telescopes using adaptive optics.
Pluto is not only smaller and much less massive than every other planet, but at less than 0.2 lunar masses it is also smaller and less massive than seven moons: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Earth's Moon, Europa and Triton. However, Pluto is more than twice the diameter, and a dozen times the mass, of Ceres, the largest minor planet in the asteroid belt, and it was larger than any other object known in the trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt until 2003 UB313 was announced in 2005.
 
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Markus6

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Brent said:
Pluto and Xena are both Kuiper belt objects -- they're large comets, not plantets. Anyway, I predict that once a dozen or more of these so-called "planets" are discovered," astronomers will realize how absurd their new classification system is, and make the proper corrections.
A comet has to emit a coma and/or a tail (as far as I'm aware Pluto and Xena do not). A comet's nucleus is just a 'minor planet' (for want of a better word) so in that way they are similar. However, all other objects we call comets came from outer space and (due to this and gravitational affects of the major planets) have constantly changing orbits. As a consequence it would not be right to call them comets.
 
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LightHorseman

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Well TECHNICALLY...

Commets don't have to emit a comma, unless they are in an inner system orbit. It is estimated that there are several million commets out in the Oort cloud, but they are so far from the Sun that they never receive enough energy to volatile off any gas, so they don't form a comma. Needless to say, given the distance from the sun, they fact they are radiologically inert, and relatively small, means the chances of detecting these objects are very remote within todays observational equipment.

Pluto (or Pluto-Charon, since we're being anal) and Xena ARE both kupier belt objects, however they are also tentatively planets under the currently accepted definition, and if the definition before the IAU goes through, they will be officially. Commets tend to be dirty snowballs, a few rocks in large chunks of CO2 and water ice, held together loosely under their own gravity. Pluto, Charon, and probably Xena are rocky objects, and closer to what we would think of as planets. An analogy? Comets like the Arctic ice sheet, Pluto et al like Antarctica, if you will. Pluto is also a bit bigger than yóur average commet.
 
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Markus6

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LightHorseman said:
Commets don't have to emit a comma, unless they are in an inner system orbit. It is estimated that there are several million commets out in the Oort cloud,
Do we call potential comets still in the Oort cloud comets? I guess the point is moot as we've never actually seen one there. I'd have thought it was only when they were in an inner system orbit and so looking like comets that we'd call them comets.
 
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LightHorseman said:
Pluto was discovered in 1930, hence, in 1924 people probably had the figure 8 firmly etched into their minds.

Pluto and its satellite Charon have often been considered a binary planet because they are more nearly equal in size than any other planet/moon combination in the Solar System, and because the two bodies orbit a point not within the surface of either. Under the aforementioned planet definition proposal, since they orbit each other around a center of mass that is outside either body, they would be officially considered a binary planet system

Pluto's mass and diameter could only be estimated for many decades after its discovery. The discovery of its satellite Charon in 1978 enabled a determination of the mass of the Pluto-Charon system by simple application of Newton's formulation of Kepler's third law. Later, Pluto's diameter was measured when it was occulted by Charon, and its disc can now be resolved by telescopes using adaptive optics.
Pluto is not only smaller and much less massive than every other planet, but at less than 0.2 lunar masses it is also smaller and less massive than seven moons: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto, Io, Earth's Moon, Europa and Triton. However, Pluto is more than twice the diameter, and a dozen times the mass, of Ceres, the largest minor planet in the asteroid belt, and it was larger than any other object known in the trans-Neptunian Kuiper belt until 2003 UB313 was announced in 2005.

Cite your sources, please:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto
 
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LightHorseman

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Yep, they're still commets.

Consider it this way;

Hayleys, and the other in system perenials, head right back out again, and indeed, brush the inner edges of the Oort cloud. They stop "comma-ing" way before they even leave the planetary orbits, and by the time they are back out around Pluto, they are just as inert as the long time slow orbit ice balls that have never shifted from the Oort cloud. Indeed, if you went out there, the only way to tell Hayley's from anything else, is by comparing its orbital path. But you'd still call Hayley's commet a commet right? Even though it wasn't incandescent at that moment?

Ditto the long orbit ones. They are, after all, POTENTIAL in system commets, its just a matter of their regular orbit shifting. But substance-wise, they are exactly the same.

Of course, astronomers aren't always so clear minded...
Meteoroid in space, meteor as it passes through the atmosphere, then meteorite if it hits the ground, 3 names for the same piece of rock. But to the best of my knowledge, a commet is a commet is a commet.
 
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Dannager

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Gwenyfur said:
has anyone ever seen the Oort cloud?

I dont' recall seeing photos...
As far as I'm aware, nope. That's a long shot from saying it doesn't exist, though. The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical phenomenon that succeeds in explaining many different lines of evidence, which means it is fairly strong as hypotheses go.
 
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LightHorseman

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Well as stated in my last, Oort cloud is way WAY away, made up of non incandescent objects, that while in themselves can be quite large, are in relative terms, quite tiny and with huge distances between them. It is not like Saturn's rings, for example, nor even like the Asteroid belt. Although we are talking millions of objects, the disc that they comprise is utterly astronomical, possibly as much as 2 light years in diameter. So even if you were looking at one object out there, the chances of a second Oort cloud object being in the same field of view is small. Then, given the relative size, and the relative strength of our telescopes, if these objects can be detected at all, they would be the merest glimmer against the black of space.

So to answer your question, no, I don't think there are any photographs of Oort cloud objects.
 
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shernren

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Shouldn't the title have read : Scientist changed their definition? Science of Pluto hasn't changed .. it still a dead rock.

I agree wholeheartedly! lols.

If the International Astronomical Union declares tomorrow that the moon is made of green cheese, then that will be a major scientific shift. This is just an arbitrary, human renaming. This really doesn't change the scientific evidence that points to the whole solar system (no matter how many planets) being far more than 6,000 years old.
 
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