• JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works
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    3 months ago

    What is Pluto doing so close to Australia?

    That shouldn’t be allowed. Someone tell it to go back to it’s usual orbit, this is not on.

    • Übercomplicated@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      Discreetly insulting both Australia and Pluto in one sentence! Absolutely love this; will share it with all my Australia and Plutonian friends! If Earth gets attacked, it’s not my fault, but yours :'P

        • zerofk@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Australians can’t attack Earth, they’d fall right up into the sky without some reverse-reverse-gravity system.

    • lugal@lemmy.ml
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      3 months ago

      When they came for Pluto, I said nothing because I wasn’t a planet
      When they came for Australia, I said nothing because I wasn’t a continent
      When they came for Bielefeld, I said nothing because I wasn’t a city
      When they came for me, there was no one left to say anything

      – Martin Niemöller

  • x4740N@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    Pluto is still a sphere, this is an unfair comparison because Pluto hasn’t been unwrapped

    • Troy@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Even more amazing that it was found in the era it was. People were pouring over the skies looking for the next big planet, and instead they found this little guy.

      There are still some orbital dynamics suggestions that something large and dark is lurking out there – an ice giant. But it’s still largely conjecture. It’d be interesting to see how they define it should they find something very large (say Neptune mass), but it hasn’t cleared its orbit. Is it a planet or not? :D

      • lugal@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        Actually 🤓 it was James Cook who found Australia and he didn’t go there by ski but by ship and he didn’t find one little guy but exterminated a whole indigenous population

      • Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        They only found it because it’s more like a binary dwarf planet system than a planet/moon system, so the telescopes were able to pick up light reflected from both Pluto and Charron, while Pluto alone might have not been bright enough.

        • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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          3 months ago

          Apparent scale is inverse linear, i.e., proportional to 1 / distance. If we want the apparent scale of two objects to be about 90% accurate to their actual relative scale, their relative distances to the camera can’t be more than 10% different. Pluto being 40-ish astronomical from Earth, you’d want to shoot from about 400 AU. Voyager I should be in prime position circa 2140.

      • lugal@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

        No! Austria will never be a planet nor continent. It is a white, European country and I’m willing to die on that hill!

    • youngalfred@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      Absolute size isn’t really in the criteria for a planet though. Pluto isn’t a planet because it shares its orbit with lots of other icy bodies in the Kuiper belt.

      • toast@retrolemmy.com
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        3 months ago

        Exactly. That’s also why Jupiter, which shares its orbit with thousands of asteroids, isn’t a planet either.

        • youngalfred@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Do you mean the Trojans? They’re excluded from the mass calculation of ‘clearing the neighbourhood’ because they’re in a resonant orbit - their orbit is a consequence of Jupiter’s mass.

          • toast@retrolemmy.com
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            3 months ago

            I don’t know. I don’t think we should make excuses for Jupiter just because of its size. Pluto’s doing the best it can. Could any of us do any better, so far out from the sun?

              • toast@retrolemmy.com
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                3 months ago

                Thanks to your comments, I went looking at more about Jupiter’s influence on us and read that most of the other planets are more in line with Jupiter’s orbital plane than the Sun’s equatorial plane (which sounds impressive, but maybe only makes complete sense since the planets would have all initially formed from the same disk). Anyway, thanks

                • youngalfred@lemm.ee
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                  3 months ago

                  That’s really interesting!
                  I just discovered a theory about the cause of the ‘late heavy bombardment’, which is thought to have delivered water to earth via comets.

                  Essentially the gas giants all orbited much closer, but Jupiter and Saturn got into resonance and flung Uranus and Neptune way out (and Saturn too). Uranus and Neptune flew out into the path of a heap of ice, and their gravity pulled the ice into an orbit that collided with the terrestrial planets.

  • Zier@fedia.io
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    3 months ago

    As a former Plutonian, I can confirm it’s small, that’s why we immigrated to Earth. And fucking cold!