IAU Decides Earth is No Longer a Planet

HONOLULU (AP) -- The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the international body of scientists responsible for naming stars, planets, and other astronomical bodies, announced today that following a vote taken at its annual Spring meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii that it was reclassifying the Earth. The IAU voted to strip Earth of its "planet" designation and reclassifying it as a "giant dwarf planet." An IAU spokesman said that the change is meant to eliminate confusion following its 2006 decision to demote Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet" status.

"We chose to reclassify Pluto in part because it is part of a larger body of objects which we call the 'Kuiper Belt,'" said IAU spokesman James Brown. "Since Pluto is too puny to clear this area of debris, we felt that a new designation was necessary to distinguish Pluto from proper planets like Venus and Neptune." Brown went on to explain the motivation which drove the IAU's decision regarding Earth. "As with Pluto, the way we see Earth's place in the solar system must change as new discoveries are made. Earth was once regarded as the center of the universe but as science progressed, our view of Earth's place in the universe had to change. As more and more Near Earth Objects (NEOs) have been discovered it appears that Earth, despite its much larger mass and gravity, like Pluto is not able to completely clear the neighborhood around its orbit. While many NEOs like Apophis will probably either collide with Earth or be ejected from their orbits by Earth's gravity, there are also enough objects like Cruithne with weird but stable orbits that we feel that a new classification was necessary to describe Earth's place in the solar system."

A second vote to decide whether or not Jupiter should be promoted from a "planet" to a "dwarf brown dwarf" has been scheduled for the IAU's winter meeting in December.

Galaxy Zoo—Part Game, All Science

A couple of years ago, some astronomers hit upon the idea of taking publicly available telescope data and building an online community around it for the purpose of cataloging galaxies. While the aim of the project is serious, it can provide a lot of fun for its users. And that's the key to its appeal for me. Most of the people who participate in Galaxy Zoo are complete amateurs with little or no training in astronomy but like a well written game, Galaxy Zoo guides them, helping them recognize the patterns that classify different types of galaxies. This allows Galaxy Zoo's thousands of users to catalog hundreds of thousands of galaxies. The project has already led to some major discoveries and has now moved into a second stage which makes it even more addictive. Before, Galaxy Zoo would allow users to choose between two major galaxy shapes, spiral and elliptical or label them a star or unknown object. Now it has become more interactive, prompting the user to provide more information about the pattern of the galaxy's appearance. It's fun for the user and provide the website with a lot data in a short time. It also allows users to undo mistakes—a feature which was sorely missing from the old Galaxy Zoo. Finally, it allows users to save their favorite galaxy pictures and share them with other users in the site's bustling forums. Part game and part social network, Galaxy Zoo provides an exciting look at science in action.

Do You Sometimes Feel Small?

Bet you do now:

And Now For Something Completely Different...

A comet with two tails.


And one with two heads.

Milky Way Galaxy Puts On Weight, Turns Up Speed On Treadmill

Slashdot links to a Cosmos article about a new study which shows that our Galaxy is about %50 more massive and that the sun rotates around it much faster than previously thought. Even though it's a pretty fascinating article with some rather profound implications for our very distant future, I must confess that I'm mostly writing this up as an excuse for the cheesy title I could give to the this blog post.

Ever Have Your Mind Blown By A Cartoon?

Well, now you have.

Pluto Debate Continues to Continue

Astrobiology Magazine has an interesting article on the continuing debate over the status of Pluto. Mark Sykes of the Planetary Science Institute debated the always charismatic Neil deGrasse Tyson recently on the IAU's decision to "demote" Pluto from planet status to dwarf planet status. This is an issue which can provoke a lot of passion when lay people, let alone scientists, debate it.

One of the most interesting things about the article is that as our knowledge of the planets has grown, the community of people which studies them has grown as well.

"When I first started in this business, a large fraction of planetary scientists were astronomers who had cut their teeth on Earth-based telescopes," Sykes said. "Since then, we've been flooded with data coming back from close flybys, orbiters, landers and rovers. Most of the planetary science questions being asked today are geophysical and geological. Planetary science is merging with terrestrial science to become real comparative planetology. Only a small fraction of the planetary science community belongs to the IAU anymore."

That's a pretty surprising thing to a lay person like myself. Most of the people who study planets these days aren't necessarily astronomers, they are geologists, physicists, chemists and all sorts of other flavors of scientist. No wonder it's so hard for people to agree on these things.

It's interesting thing to see the sausage being made as scientists debate an issue in public. While Pluto's status is a thorny issue, it's a fairly easy to understand issue. It's not obscure or difficult to understand like dark matter or dark energy. Everyone has heard of Pluto and seen pictures of Pluto and knows a lot of the facts that are being argued over in this debate. Perhaps this is why it's so compelling.

"It's good for people to know that debate in science is the norm," Sykes said. "Science is dynamic. Science is argumentative. Science is continual testing and challenging. Science is not about something everyone has to memorize because some organization has given it its blessing."

Eye Candy From Space!

NASA has put up a gorgeous interactive image gallery that allows you to zoom in on extremely high quality pictures of the universe. Incredibly cool:



Did I mention that it also has videos?

Pondering the Planet of the Apes

Astrobiology Magazine interviews Australian Cosmologist Charley Lineweaver. Lineweaver uses the movie Planet of the Apes to illustrate some of the misconceptions about evolution and its implications for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). It's a pretty fascinating take on how our expectations are shaped by science fiction and on the rareness of human intelligence. No other species has evolved the way we have and even though animals like dolphins have their own form of intelligence, no one expects them—or any other animal—to start building radio telescopes any time soon. And yet we are far closer to the animals we with which we share the Earth than we will ever be to any alien civilization that might exist. Which is what leads Lineweaver to the following conclusion:

"But I still believe that the best evidence we have suggests that we should not expect to see human beings anywhere in the universe except Earth. We should not expect to see Indian elephants or any other forms of life that are genetically, functionally and cerebrally similar to us. I strongly suspect that our closest relatives in the universe are here on Earth, and they’re not likely to be elsewhere."

I used to have the SETI screensaver running on my computer while I was in college. Over the years, I've grown older and more cynical but I still love stories like this one about the possibility of life in the universe.

The Text Message From Space!

As part of an attempt to reach out to young people, NASA has put the Phoenix Mars probe on Twitter which makes it possible for cell phone users to get text messages directly from the red planet. Not wanting to be left behind, The European Space Agency has also put its Planck spacecraft on Twitter. Perhaps due to its more esoteric mission, Planck is much less popular on Twitter than Phoenix. I can't help but wonder how this development affects that the recent claims that an SMS message is four times more expensive than the cost of getting data from the Hubble Space telescope.

Bad Astronomy, Good Explanations

Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy website started out mainly as a forum for nitpicking the science in movies (hence the name) but over the years, Phil has turned it into a valuable and entertaining way of educating people about astronomy. Here's a video of Phil answering an intriguing question, "why don't giant clouds of gas dissipate in space?"

Cool and Educational

Here's a very cool flash animation which shows the planets of the solar system (and a few extrasolar systems) and their orbiting moons. You can zoom in and out and see the moons spinning faster and slower. It's quite mesmerizing to see the moons around giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn buzzing around their parent worlds like swarms of bees.