New dwarf planet added to our solar system

Tenacious-Techhunter said:
Well, here’s something along the lines of what I’d heard...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood#Disagreement

The argument that the big planets haven't cleared their orbits is specious. When they say "has a planet cleared its orbit" they actually mean "is the planet is the dominant object in that region?". And there are numerical ways of calculating that (the determinant shown there being one of them), and they all show that the numbers calculated for what we call Dwarf Planets such as Pluto, Ceres, Eris, Makemake and the like are far, far smaller than the numbers for the 8 major planets (yes, even Mercury). There are orders of magnitudes of difference between the numbers for the two sets, so they're obviously different classes of object.

And even using Stern's own method of calculating shown there, his numerical definition of "clearing the orbit" still wouldn't have Pluto as a full planet (it'd be an "unterplanet" as he awkwardly calls it. Personally I didn't see what was wrong with calling things "Major planets" and "Minor planets" as we did before).
 
Reynard said:
They can find a 700Km boulder but not a planet.

700km is about the size of France, so that's a pretty big "boulder".

And if Planet Nine is out there, it's believed to be even further out, and therefore much harder to detect.
 
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