Yesterday the IAU (International Astonomical Union) decided not only to permanantly make Pluto a planet rather than a large asteroid, but also to include Charon, Ceres & good ol' 2003UB313 as planets! Now we will have 8 'classical' planets, namely : Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus & Neptune, & 4 'plutons' which is the silly name they have given to the category of distant, eliptical orbit objects which meets certain size criteria.
The 4 Plutons are Pluto, Charon, Ceres & 2003UB313. So in all likelyhood... more plutons will be discovered & named as planets in the future... something to look forward to. :P

Full Story.

The world's astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), have concluded two years of work defining the difference between "planets" and the smaller "solar system bodies" such as comets and asteroids. If the definition is approved by the astronomers gathered 14-25 August 2006 at the IAU General Assembly in Prague, our Solar System will include 12 planets, with more to come: eight classical planets that dominate the system, three planets in a new and growing category of "plutons" - Pluto-like objects - and Ceres. Pluto remains a planet and is the prototype for the new category of "plutons."

http://www.iau2006.org/mirror/www.iau.org/iau0601/medium/iau0601a.jpg

2003 UB₃₁₃

what the hell

Edit: oh I see

The object currently has the provisional designation 2003 UB313, granted automatically according to the IAU's naming protocols for minor planets.

last edited by scuzzy at 10:33:12 17/Aug/06

that's the typical naming structure of newly discovered asteroids. the technical 'placeholder' name... it'll be given a grecian mythology name soon enough.

So what? Now all the little kiddies have to remember:
My
Very
Elderly
Mother
Just
Sat
Up
Near
Pluto
Carying
2003 UB313

You'll need another C between Mother and Just.

easier just to remember the planet names instead of that silly sentence

Hmm, carefully?

easier just to remember the planet names instead of that silly sentence

It's actually easier not to give a s***, unless of course you're an astronaught.

saved by the bell showed me how to remember them by saying mvemsjnup thats not gonna work anymore

casa, that kind of apathy isn't helping the environment
we could use your care photons to assist with global warming

I demand more spacepix in this thread

nice work demon ++

haha yeah
The only cool thing about space, are the pics.

Having knowledge of space is totally useless for the majority of us. Extra planets means nothing to us, unless theres phat pics of them!

The only cool thing about space, are the pics.

Everything is cool about space. I'd get off this rock in a second if someone started up a colony on some other planet (as long as there were no religious people there)

knowledge is rarely useless

Hadn't they named one of them Xena?

^ hahaha trog

on that note: http://www.spikedhumor.com/articles/47898/Atheist.html
remember, if you don't believe in god, you're vile and your deeds are no good

we don't even have particularly good pics of pluto yet

that really is a dopey video

Unless itt affects us directly, I dont see knowledge of space being of much use. Perhaps down the track, knowing what gases make up pluto will be of use.

Unless itt affects us directly, I dont see knowledge of space being of much use.

How about, just as an example, how the sun is responsible for all life on this planet?

A significant proportion of anything useful humans have ever done is based on stuff learned from space. Not just awesome stuff like going to the moon, but the original nerds like Newton figuring stuff out the hard way doing nothing but watching the stars.

Like I said, unless it affects us directly. s*** to do with the sun, obviously is the be all and end all of our existence. Not pluto, for example.

You won't be so flippant if someone straps a rocket booster to Pluto and tries to crash it into the earth

Calm down everyone, trog's just on drugs again.

big time.

You won't be so flippant if someone straps a rocket booster to Pluto and tries to crash it into the earth

particularly, if there are snakes on that hijacked planet.

Imagine, a rocket proppelled frozen planet of snakes. f*** that.

please leave casa in his ignorance... can't you all see how blissful he is! just sitting there, rocking back n forth, preferring not to learn anything that while it might have an indirect effect on his existance, teachs him nothing about the important things in life.. like how to take a believable dive in foozbawl & stuff like that! :D
http://www.cfht.hawaii.edu/hs/AIOM/English/2006/Images/Jun-Image2005-CFHT-Coelum.jpg

we could use your care photons to assist with global warming

bahah.. i lol'd ;D
biggish space pic

Hadn't they named one of them Xena?

thankfully this was never an official name for 2003UB313 :) it was just a placeholder name used by it's discoverers until the iau gives it a name.
http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0511/bubble_croman.jpg

last edited by demon at 14:58:42 17/Aug/06

while you're lol'ing I'll be over here going through your stuff!

See now, that last picture is rad.

Not sure exactly, what knowing about anything in it has to do with my existence, or how it affects me in my day to day life, coping with all the 'italy are divers' tears coming from your face, but it doesn't make it any less awesome to look at.

I'm sorry that not everyone shares the same cock-throbbing lust with space as others; I guess its one of those, 'difference in personalities' things they have going on in human emotions these days ;) Once again, not affected by sapce!

COOL PIC THOUGH

last edited by casa at 15:10:26 17/Aug/06

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0608/perseidcolorado_vsoske_c82.jpg

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0608/northamerica_outters.jpg

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap060816.html

Gotta love americans, they're so full of themselves.

This emission nebula on the left is famous partly because it resembles Earth's continent of North America.

They've obviously never seen their own country from space.

at least you now acknowledge it's your own personal standpoint, as opposed to it being the standpoint of 'the majority of us'

hey i took the time to learn about foozbawl players & thier antics even though the information was quite irrelevant to me. didn't hurt or anything... learning stuff that didn't directly affect me! :D

tis a cool pic.

you are affected by space, just like everything, in space, is.

Well, it is useless to you Jim, you just dont want to admit it ;)

Hahahaha, you said Uranus!

nah, it's completely useful to me
I'm continually trying to launch my fourby into space

You need to get yourself one of these bad puppies

http://userdata.acd.net/reiheld/jet1.jpg

Jim,
Did I hear you are with Suncorp? Dump those mofo's for 4b bud, AAMI was half the proce for our new commanders.

Space is the only thing I have been continuously passionate about since my earliest cognisant thoughts.

Nice thread Demon :)

haha casa

E.T: I've got a really long story about how fan-f***ing-tasticly awesome suncorp have been with my 4WD claims which I'll tell you sometime I don't have to type it ;) in short, there's no way in hell I'm dumping them :)

my premium is only ~$600 anyway
what'd aami hit you up for on a commander?

$719
Its insured for 78K I think, so thats pretty good.

yeah my premium was closer to $700 on my prado grande
it dropped when I traded it in on the patrol, the patrol is about 63 rrp

however I've got 20-30k of after market gear on it and despite being added to the policy, it hasn't bumped the premium up to what the prado was which is nifty

^ that proves it

A significant proportion of anything useful humans have ever done is based on stuff learned from space. Not just awesome stuff like going to the moon, but the original nerds like Newton figuring stuff out the hard way doing nothing but watching the stars.

Old skool nerds bah. Plato offered a prize to the first student at the academy to explain to motion of the heavenly bodies with a regular theory (ie regular motion).

Can't remember the guy who solved it by name, but in an interesting side note the Greeks had four pure schools of knowledge and one for basically everything else.

the four pure ones were Arithmetic, Geometry, Music and Astronomy. The one that covered more or less the rest was called phusis (no prizes for guessing which science now bears its name).

finally Newtons universal gravitation had no explaination. He called it an occult force.

I want to complain about there being no prize. It's not even worth trying to guess!

phusis(no prizes for guessing which science now bears its name).

poo-sis.. erhm let me guess proctology? You know what them greek were like back then ;)

PLUTO was stripped of its status as a planet overnight when scientists from around the world redefined it as a "dwarf planet", leaving just eight classical planets in the solar system.

With one vote, toys and models of the solar system became instantly obsolete, forcing teachers and publishers to scramble to update textbooks and lessons used in classrooms for decades.

“Pluto is dead,” Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology bluntly said on a teleconference.

Discovered in 1930 by the American Clyde Tombaugh, Pluto has traditionally been considered the ninth planet, farthest from the sun in the solar system.

Story

i think that was the decision most people interested in astronomy were waiting for. it was a mistake to call pluto a planet in the first place... the yanks just wanted a 'planet' that was discovered by an american :P
so now we have 8 planets & an unknown amount of 'minor planets/dwarf planets/plutons/whatever! :P i still think the iau definitions on planetary status need to be reviewed & tightened... the bit about 'must have cleared it's orbital path' is bollux. earth still has transitory asteroids in it's orbital path as would most of the classical planets.

With one vote, toys and models of the solar system became instantly obsolete, forcing teachers and publishers to scramble to update textbooks and lessons used in classrooms for decades.

... scramble? like it's that big a deal. ZOMG TRIVIA IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING EVER!!!!!!! HURRY, OR WE WON'T WIN ON THE GAME SHOWS WHEN THEY ASK ABOUT THE PLANETS!!!!

yeah, i never considered pluto as one of us

and yet what of rupert?