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This is the sort of silly law I can actually get behind, so long as they didn’t spend long on it. It adds a bit of local flavor, and has a positive motive.
Makes for a good bar trivia question.
I love New Mexico
Illinoian here to provide additional context.
In 2009, the Illinois State Senate passed a resolution to return Pluto to its planetary status, partly in honor of its discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh, who was from Streator, Illinois. The resolution was a response to the IAU’s 2006 vote that reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet.
Ill. Senate declares Pluto a planet | https://abc7chicago.com/archive/6695131/
I like the “legally” part implying that you will get a ticket for insisting it is a planet.
Earth’s axis tilts at 23.5° and Pluto’s orbit at 17° so it does cross NM sometimes (southernmost point around 31°).
Pluto is the king of the dwarf planets. Or the ass end of the major planets.
Am afraid it’s not even the king. Eris is both substantially more massive and further away. In fact, it’s the discovery of Eris that led to the realisation that Pluto shouldn’t be considered a planet at all.
Why the fuck we didn’t just deem Eris into planethood I’ll never understand. Both it and Pluto are arguably more similar to Terra than the gas giants are.
I think because if we called both Eris and Pluto planets, then we’d have a bunch of other current dwarf planets that would also qualify, like Ceres, Makemake, etc.
I for one welcome all these Plutoid planets to the planet family.
What’s the downside, we have to make a new mnemonic? Or add a verse to the Blue’s Clues Planet Song? I think we’re capable.
On the upside pluto being classified as a dwarf planet is what of what got ceres promoted out of asteroid and into dwarf planet, and now its turning out to be super interesting with potential subsurface ice and possibly being the core remnant of a failed planet that was torn apart by jupiter before it could fully form.
Eris may be more massive, but Pluto is larger.
Your mom is too, yet we don’t call her a planet either.
She’ll clear her own orbit eventually! You’ll see!
Appropriately named huh
People are adorable sometimes.
This is so dumb.
Let people have their harmless fun. This hurts no one.
The mindset of “wah, science is wrong and bad because it changed its mind about something I learned about as a child” is not harmless, it’s how we end up with anti-vaxxers in charge of the CDC
I’ve directly heard the argument from creationists of “they were wrong about Pluto being a planet, why would they be right about evolution?” Yeah, misunderstanding how all this works does matter.
It’s not so much this case in particular, but the idea of it and what it represents. Pluto being a dwarf planet or not is really just an astronomical categorisation, and that’s where the usefulness starts and ends. You won’t go to jail for calling it a planet, even though it doesn’t meet the standards.
The idea of using legislation on such an irrelevant thing is what rankles me. It’s frivolous and could be harmful. Perhaps not in this particular case, but legislating away expert opinion because it doesn’t fit with your personal narrative is a problem.
Right now it’s a planet, but this shit happens with peoples lives as well.
tax payer’s money well spent
This is elder millennials bait
*Gen Y
That’s what they said
Pluto posting means you get Planet X’d:
Pluto is, and always will be, a planet. That Tyson guy just got a bunch of his friends to agree with him about Pluto not being a planet so he could further his career with shock and awe, and lots of talk show spots. Talk show spots are where the real money is, not science. He’s a genius (but wrong about Pluto).
just got a bunch of his friends to agree with him
You mean the International Astronomical Union? I mean at some point if every world-level expert on the topic is saying the same thing, then maybe you need to let go of what Miss Honey told you in first grade.
He’s not a genuis, he’s smart but very arrogant, he’s intolerable when you get him next to an actual subject matter expert
But he is right about Pluto. We either would need to add a half dozen+ more planets, or demote one into a new category. And Pluto would currently be in the bottom of that category - it’s barely large enough to fit in the new category, so it’s not a matter of where to draw the line
And in his words, if Pluto was between us and the sun it would grow a tail, and that’s no type of behavior for a planet to have
