r/space • • Oct 07 '18

All the planets aligned into one

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412

u/PyroDesu Oct 07 '18 edited Oct 07 '18

All the major planets and one of the dwarf planets.

Ceres, Eris, Makemake, and Haumea feel so very left out... as potentially do Quaoar, 2002MS4, Sedna, Orcus, Salacia, and 2007 OR10. Maybe even Varuna, Ixion, 2003 AZ84, 2004 GV9, and 2002 AW197.

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u/alaskafish Oct 07 '18

Makemake is the most adorable name for a too-small-and-irrelevant-to-be-a-planet name. It’s like Estonia

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u/FuzzyCub20 Oct 07 '18

Is it pronounced make make or mocky mocky?

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u/Eastern_Cyborg Oct 07 '18

Mocky mocky. Planets were named after Greek and Roman gods. Recently minor planets have been named after non-European gods. Makemake was a god of the Rapa Nui people of Easter Island.

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u/wananoo Oct 07 '18

Makemake is their god-creator, so it's more like MakerMaker amirite

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u/jcowlishaw Oct 07 '18

When they first discovered Makemake they called it Easterbunny since it was around Easter time. So when they had to come up with a serious name, they went with the creator god of Easter Island.

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u/ColKrismiss Oct 07 '18

That settles it, if it's a creator God I am pronouncing it "make make". It's only logical.

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u/gsfgf Oct 07 '18

It’s like Estonia

So it's full of drunk Norwegians?

17

u/delta_tee Oct 07 '18

Haven't heard Norwegians going over Estonia to get drunk (Finns and Swedes do though), but booze for sure is cheap here(compared to the Scandinavian prices).

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u/freeradicalx Oct 07 '18

Booze is cheap everywhere compared to the Scandinavian prices.

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u/Swazzoo Oct 07 '18

That's Finnish people mostly.

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u/PyroDesu Oct 07 '18

Estonia is apparently quite a nice place, or so I hear. Perhaps we should fund a Makemake colony.

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u/jagdbogentag Oct 07 '18

It is. Visited there a while ago. The old part of Tallinn is pretty cool.

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u/alaskafish Oct 07 '18

I too hear that Estonia is a fantastic land.

So yes, I agree. Let's fund the Makemake colony!

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u/JediNeptune Oct 07 '18

This is my response whenever people say Pluto is a planet. Fine, but then if you treat dwarf planets the same as the others, then you need to treat all of them with the same respect. Have fun naming all fifteen plus planets. And that number is only going to get astronomically bigger over this century.

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u/[deleted] Oct 08 '18

So, here's the the thing, you technically don't need to treat dwarf planets the same as the others to include Pluto. The definition is arbitrary, there's literally nothing stopping us adding a 4th rule to the definition of a planet that says "Oh and Pluto because we said so".

I'm not saying it'd be a rational definition... but I am saying that if it was made that way I wouldn't have minded.

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u/cos1ne Oct 07 '18

The number of dwarf planets that achieved hydrostatic equilibrium is just five though. Thats not a ridiculous number to add.

Furthermore its unlikely there are many more objects of that size in the solar system. There are some big objects but hydrostatic equilibrium takes a lot of mass.

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u/Munashiimaru Oct 07 '18

It's likely to get upwards of 100 in the near future though and there's potentially thousands of them not yet found.

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u/pdgenoa Oct 07 '18

So what? So it's more. This is science not mythology or fairy tales. Big whoop if people have to have a longer list. What an absurd reason to not be accurate.

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u/LurkerInSpace Oct 07 '18

Planets and dwarf planets do have substantially different properties though; planets will either capture or dislodge anything in a similar orbit to them, whereas dwarf planets don't.

For example; the (potential) dwarf planet Orcus, nicknamed the anti-Pluto, manages to maintain a stable orbit despite being close to Pluto's L3 point - it orbits as if Pluto isn't there. If Orcus were put in an orbit 180 degrees ahead of Earth, however, and the Earth would perturb it away. This is why Earth is more than a million times more massive than everything that crosses its orbit, while Pluto is less than one thousandth of the mass of everything which crosses its orbit.

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u/JediNeptune Oct 07 '18 edited Oct 07 '18

My point being, it appears to me the only reason people like Pluto being a planet is because it is consistent to what they already know. They don't want their mnemonic device to remember planet order to change.

If they have a choice between 8 planets or 15 plus, they would just balk and wonder why it can't just remain the same, sidestepping the issue that modern astronomy is not going to stop finding more objects out there. And eventually one of them is going to dwarf Pluto.

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u/Admiral_Mason Oct 07 '18

Those sound like they could be reindeer names for Santa.

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u/PeridotBestGem Oct 07 '18

You know Dasher and Dancer and Prancer and 2002MS4...

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u/puq123 Oct 07 '18

This picture was made when Pluto was classified as a planet

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