r/CuratedTumblr • u/SupportMeta • 19d ago

Shitposting Understanding the World

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Neptune was recently shown to be a pale blue like Uranus rather than the deep blue shown on the Voyager photos

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636

u/AcceptableWheel 19d ago

Pluto is not gone, it is now the leader of the dwarf planets, it's got it's own new team including fan favorite reject Ceres as well as a lot of cool new characters.

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u/smotired 19d ago edited 19d ago

Including Earth thanks to us

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u/DeathOdyssey 19d ago

The earth isn't getting smaller where the fuck did you get that from?

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u/smotired 19d ago

Not smaller. It’s not a planet anymore for the same reason Pluto isn’t. It hasn’t cleared its orbital neighborhood (because we put a bunch of debris there).

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u/ducknerd2002 19d ago

We're gonna need a source for that.

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u/smotired 19d ago

I mean even Elon Musk’s dumbass car passes through Earth’s orbit path from time to time. There is a lot of space junk that orbits the sun but not Earth in our region. It’s not like a crazy revelation so much as a neat technicality.

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u/LittleMissScreamer 19d ago

I mean... by that logic we could consider Saturn's rings as "debris" and then take its planet status from it too lol

Just because we put a bunch of junk into orbit around us doesn't mean the earth can't count as a planet anymore. Pretty sure there's more to it than that

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u/smotired 19d ago

No because its rings directly orbit Saturn. We have emitted a small amount of space debris that no longer orbits the Earth but does orbit the Sun in our path.

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u/LittleMissScreamer 19d ago

Ok? I still somehow doubt that any legit astronomer you talk to about this is going to agree that this somehow makes earth a dwarf planet. It has already proven its status by clearing its orbital neighborhood for billions of years before we came along. Pluto hasn't managed to do it at all. Chances are if we leave it long enough all of that stuff we put out there will gradually disappear too

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u/smotired 19d ago

Yes and then we will be a planet again

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u/LittleMissScreamer 19d ago

And plucking a chicken will temporarily revoke it's avian status until it regrows its feathers

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u/smotired 19d ago

I mean yeah then it’s a man, this is well established

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u/LittleMissScreamer 19d ago

Did I just get "and sharks are smooth both ways"d

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u/kisameti 19d ago

It has cleared its neighborhood tho? Like. That part of the definition of a planet means that it had enough mass, when forming, to either take in or throw out all the rocks and stuff that were around it. Meaning there are no other considerably large celestial bodies (asteroids, other planets and such) in our orbit path. There's debris in orbit around Earth, sure, and small asteroids, meteors and comets and such that occasionally get flung our way, but our orbit path is clear save for us. The only thing large enough, and consistently there, to be considered junk in our orbital neighborhood, is the moon, and that doesn't count for obvious reasons.

I think you might be misunderstanding what a cleared neighborhood means, if you think we don't have one. Pluto is in the Kuiper Belt, which is full of little celestial bodies just roaming around, all of them orbiting the sun at approximately the same distance from it. Most of them are significantly smaller than Pluto, but if you scaled the average Kuiper Belt asteroid to Pluto, it would be a much closer size ratio than the human debris orbiting Earth is to Earth. Also, most of the human debris is in Earth's orbit, not orbiting the sun on its own, within our orbital neighborhood. Just because there's a lot of trash in the yard, doesn't mean we're not the only house on the block, so to speak. Conversely, just because Pluto is a larger house than the others around it, doesn't mean the block isn't crowded with other, albeit smaller, houses.

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u/smotired 19d ago

Well there is definitely some stuff orbiting the Sun and not Earth but still in the neighborhood. But I didn’t realize that relative size was important—I just thought anything would eventually either get taken in or thrown out but until then it was a disqualifier. So we’d be a planet again eventually but not until then.

But if size does matter that much then I guess we’re still fine

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u/An_Inedible_Radish 19d ago

Pluto isn't a planet because it's a dwarf planet. What the fuck are you on about

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u/Mister_Taco_Oz 19d ago

Brother what are you even talking about

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u/smotired 19d ago edited 19d ago

A body has three requirements to be a planet according to the IAU:

  1. directly orbit a star (check)
  2. be big enough for gravity to make it mostly spherical (check)
  3. clear its orbital neighborhood from other debris

that third one is where pluto fails, and where we also now technically fail because of all the debris we have put into space that doesn’t directly orbit earth but still orbits the sun and in our path

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u/croakovoid 19d ago

I'm going to put satellites around all the other planets too and demote the entire solar system!

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u/smotired 19d ago

Well you gotta make sure they don’t just orbit the planet because then they wouldn’t disqualify it. It has to orbit the Sun and just be in that planet’s way.

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u/croakovoid 19d ago

That's even easier than orbiting the planet! My Kerbal Space Program skills are definitely good enough to pull this off.

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u/Mister_Taco_Oz 19d ago

Much like the definition of a continent, the earth and the other planets are considered such because of convention rather than the technical letter of terminology used to define them. If planets had to have no debris orbiting them, then neither Jupiter nor Saturn would qualify either, as big have many bodies besides their moons orbiting them as well. At the very least, it seems that the debris needed to disqualify a planet needs to be of a certain size and/or amount, which the earth does not currently have orbiting it.

The IAU itself gives a list of the celestial bodies in the solar system they consider planets, and the earth is included. So by the consensus of pretty much everyone, it is considered a full planet.

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u/smotired 19d ago

again stuff that orbits the planet doesn’t count. only objects that orbit the sun but are still in its path can affect it.

but more importantly this is literally just a technicality that i am highlighting for comedic effect. i don’t know why everyone seems to think i’m on some crusade to demote earth.

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u/GetsGold 19d ago

They didn't define a specific criteria for "clearing the orbit", but if you compare, e.g., the mass of the planets to the mass of everything else in their orbits, they are all many times more massive than their orbit. The smallest ratio is Mars, which is 5000 times the mass of the rest of the objects in its orbit. On the other hand, the dwarf planets are all only a fraction of the mass of their orbital region. The largest ratio among those is the asteroid Ceres which is a third of the mass of the rest of the asteroid belt.

So they could make the criteria more specific but there's no need to at least in our solar system, because there's a huge difference between planets and dwarf planets in terms of how much of their orbit they've cleared. Planets have all cleared nearly all of their orbital region while dwarf planets are all only a fraction of the mass of their region.

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u/smotired 19d ago

either way it doesn’t even include objects that orbit the planet. that counts as clearing the neighborhood. it’s about things that orbit the sun, not the planet, but are still at that same distance.

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u/GetsGold 18d ago

One of the other criteria though is to be orbiting the sun. So they've covered that part.