• Planetoid

    From Trolidan7@21:1/5 to All on Fri Dec 17 15:15:43 2021
    Recently I saw a post in sci.physics where someone claimed
    that 'neutronium' (or neutron star material) was a valid
    scientific term and as a point that Carl Sagan used it.

    At that point I did not surf through all of Carl Sagan's
    'Cosmos' series to try to find where he used the word
    'neutronium' but it seems feasible to me that he might
    have.

    When looking at the term 'Moon' on Wikipedia it put
    forth the idea that the Earth's Moon has a greater
    diameter in comparison with the planet it is revolving
    around than any other one in the solar system.

    The Earth's moon is about a quarter of the diameter
    of the Earth.

    Then I started thinking of the question. Is the
    phrase 'a dwarf planet is not a planet' actually
    using improper English? Now some adjectives or
    prefixes of a word generally mean that something
    is not part of a category of action or object.

    Like 'an untree is not a tree'.

    How about however the word 'dwarf'? Like 'a dwarf
    tree is not a tree'. In essence you have to force
    a definition of two words in sequence to make a
    phrase intentionally illogical to make the sequence
    true. The word 'dwarf' in general does not mean
    that something is not in a specific category, only
    that it is a type within it.

    In 2006, the IAU, which is headquartered in Paris,
    France but is not part of SI, adopted the term 'dwarf
    planet' but it was lazy, and did not come up with
    a new word, or even adopt some which were used
    often mostly in science fiction and were known of
    and available.

    Now to me the term 'orbital dominance' is very
    nebulous. In reality, the Earth does get impacted
    by meteorites all of the time.

    Being rounded by its own gravity or hydrostatic
    equilibrium however might generally be more coherent.
    This would be in general objects that would tend to
    have a diameter greater than Ceres and not less than
    Mimas, with Mimas to Ceres diameters being an
    iffy diameter range.

    There are a lot of moons in the solar system that
    are really substantial worlds. Two of them,
    Ganymede and Titan, are greater in diameter than
    Mercury.

    Probably none of you will, but would you consider
    using the term 'planetoid' for any object in
    hydrostatic equilibrium or being rounded by its
    own gravity, regardless of what object it revolving
    around or if it is in interstellar space?

    Sooner or later ignoring Charon might very well
    be disparaging Clyde Tombaugh, who had to compare
    and click between a lot of different photos in his
    day.

    --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)