<img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" /> Yeah, that's kind of fun. Not like antiwar demonstrations where people's lives are at stake. This has only to do with the taxonomic classification of a non-sentient globe of ice and rock.<br /><br />Obviously the NMSU protesters have a right to do this. And obviously the debate is not over. I heartily disagree with the protesters, though. I like the idea of calling the object which dominates orbital slots being called the planet.<br /><br />I think "demoting" Pluto has the result of "promoting" the Kuiper belt. Those objects are classifyable by their orbits. For instance, there is a large population of "Classical KBO's" whose orbits are more or less circular and whose inclination to the plane of the ecliptic is low. These are the cold cubewanos. Then there is a separate population of objects whose eccentricities are high and whose inclination to the plane of the ecliptic is much steeper; these are the "hot" cubewanos. Yet, these things are at about the same distance from the Sun. How did these two populations get mixed up like that? If there's no recognition of the classes, understanding isn't there.<br /><br />The Kuiper belt has other classes besides the two classes of cubewanos. There are plutinos with a 2:3 resonance with Neptune (Pluto is one of these), twotinons with a 1:2 resonance, scattered disc objects with perihelia close to Neptune, but aphelia that are way out there (Xena is one of these), and objects like Sedna and Buffy, which defy classification at this point. All are separable by their orbital characteristics.<br /><br />Classes in the asteroid belt also exist, but I'm not up on those as much.
Russian cosmonauts make quick work of space station spacewalk
A video made by me about space and the loneliness in the universe
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