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Old 17-08-2006, 13:41   #7
haku haku is offline
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Join Date: May 2003
Location: Normandie
Age: 54
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Quote:
Originally Posted by thegurgi
Wow, this is just... WOW...
Yeah, this is pretty exciting. I've been following this debate since they realized that 2003 UB313 was actually bigger than Pluto, i knew it would force the IAU to revise the planet classification, astronomers had been in a deadlock over what is or is not a planet for far too long.
I'm glad they've taken the simple approach: 'anything perfectly spherical that orbits a star is a planet', simple, clear, and efficient. And it's about time we had an official definition of planet since we are currently discovering many planets orbiting neighboring stars as well.

Quote:
Originally Posted by nishershevone
can you tell me who are the founders of those new planets?
Ceres was discovered by Piazzi in 1801, it was first considered a planet, but when they realized how small it was, they downgraded it to asteroid. Under the new IAU definition, Ceres will regain planet status.
Charon was discovered by Christy in 1978, it was first considered a satelitte of Pluto but later observation showed that Charon is not a satellite. A satelite is an object that orbits another object, the center of mass being located within the orbited object; but Charon does not orbit Pluto, Charon and Pluto orbit each other around a center of mass located in space between the two of them, the IAU now considers this to be a binary planet.
2003 UB313 was discovered by Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz in 2003, this one is brand new and is to become the 12th planet.

Quote:
Originally Posted by nishershevone
what will happen if earth will fall...where do you think we will go...?
I'm not sure what you mean by that, when Earth will be destroyed? Well, the Sun still has 4 billion years of life, that's plenty of time for humanity to develop interstellar ships.
Warp/hyper drive allowing us to travel faster than light will probably be invented in a century or two, and we won't even have to explore space blindly to look for terralike planets, astronomers are confident that in a few decades new powerful telescopes will allow us to directly observe small planets in the neighboring star systems. We will discover terralike planets long before we actually have the technology to go there, and when we do, we'll know exactly where to go to found new colonies.


Also, i personnaly think that the terraformation of Venus is possible, which would give us a second habitable planet right in our Solar System. Many people also think that Mars could be terraformed, but i think Venus is a more likely candidate, it's almost the same size as Earth (Mars is much smaller) and it has an atmosphere we can work with (Mars almost has none).
Picture of what a terraformed Venus would look like.
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Patrick | TatySite.net t.E.A.m. [ shortdickman@free.fr ]

Last edited by haku; 17-08-2006 at 14:19.
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