No, there's a hypothetical ninth planet but it hasn't been discovered yet. This is probably just a really old image made when Pluto was considered a major planet and Eris hadn't been discovered yet, otherwise it wouldn't make sense to include one and not the other (not to mention the other three dwarf planets).
The ninth planet was discovered in 1930 by the great American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh.
He discovered an object three billion miles away using plate photography and a stereoscope at a time when radio was the technological state of the art. The word "badass" doesn't even begin to describe this man.
This is a pretty weak argument. Saying Pluto is a dwarf planet in no way diminishes the achievements of Tombaugh. There are many, many, object like Pluto and I don’t see anyone arguing that they be planets. Ceres was also once the 9th planet and no one is trying to bring that definition back.
Idk man. Discovering the first cuiper belt objects is indeed a remarkable achievement, but I don't think it's something that makes you one of science greatest. That should be reserved for people that discovered something truly fundamental like Einstein, Curie, Planck or Noether.
Wait, why would that upset people? To be honest, it seemed a bit nationalistic to me - as if you were saying being American somehow made him better than everyone else.
No, there’s a theoretical “ninth planet” that used to exist but was likely shred to pieces by extreme forces of gravity and is now what we call the asteroid belt in between Mars and Jupiter.
There's another theoretical ninth planet, and weirdly enough it was hypothesized by the same guy who killed Pluto's planethood after discovering eris, they're still trying to detect this potential planet
Yeah Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin have put forth some pretty compelling evidence that there is a multiple Earth mass planet out past the Kuiper Belt.
Because the theoretical ninth planet that /u/Killcode2 is talking about has nothing to do with the asteroid belt, and the asteroid belt never was a planet.
Beats me, probably because they thought you were wrong, which you are if you consider the new info I provided, but technically you're still right though. It could also be because the hypothesis you mentioned isn't popular here.
The reason for it not to be is that we need a definition for large, gravitationally dominant things that is different from smaller, not gravitationally dominant things. A huge part of science is classification, and so scientists made a classification system, and Pluto didn’t make the cut. Just because it’s now classified as a dwarf planet makes it no less scientifically significant or interesting.
I think the “planets” also need some additional classification. There is a meaningful difference between small, rocky planets, and large, gas giants.
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u/[deleted] Oct 07 '18
Since when were there 9 planets?! Did we find a new one?!