Replying to New Planet Discovered!

"Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight. "

"The decision on Pluto at a conference of 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries was a dramatic shift from just a week ago, when the group's leaders floated a proposal that would have reaffirmed Pluto's planetary status and made planets of its largest moon and two other objects.

That plan proved highly unpopular, splitting astronomers into factions and triggering days of sometimes combative debate that led to Pluto's undoing. In the end, only about 300 astronomers cast ballots

Very scientific - to decide by votes

So, finally what does it come to ? No eccentrics allowed in sun's orbit?
Just because it is the eccentric one, who is sometimes 8th and sometimes 9th around the sun; and it goes through the backyard and front of other planets' which has not been cleared .

Now for some Indian background, in Indian astrology Neptune and Pluto have been named Varuna and Yama. (Yama is the god of death - comes through the backdoor)

Varuna and Yama are digpals, guardians of two of the eight digs (directions) in Indian mythology.

The nine planets (grahas) according to Indian mythology and astrology are: Surya, Chandra, Mangala, Budha, Guru (or Brihaspati), Shukra, Shani, Rahu and Ketu. Celestial objects that move around (unlike stars, which are stationary in relation to each other) and do not twinkle were called grahas. Each graha was assigned a god as its adhipati. (Rahu and Ketu, though asuras by birth, partook of the amrut through guile and became immortals like the devas. They are not adhipatis of any visible celestial objects but periodially consume and conceal the two largest grahas in retaliation for their sneaking to Vishnu of their deception.)

Until the invention of the telescope by Galileo, only the planets upto Saturn were visible to the naked eye and only these were described as planets by various civilizations. Uranus, it is said, can be seen with the naked eye as a green speck, under favorable conditions. However, it generally twinkles a bit like stars.

Anyways - now we've just eight planets - all the astrologists have some major re-learning to do and predictions to re-write !

JohnDa the FunDa
http://www.fundazone.com
http://www.medicozone.com

Well congratulations to those astronomers that discovered that planet. Yet theres like an infinite space out there covered with planets all over...so there should be more to come.

I often wonder how people discover new planets? Did this new planet just come into view recently because of its orbit? And regarding who names the planets, I think nowadays whoever discovers it names it. It seems to work that way for stars. You know, you can buy a star and have it named after someone. One of these days, I will do that for myself and my children...a little legacy, I guess.

Yeah this planet is really mysterious though, not much is known about it. This is good though because hopefully this discovery will spur scientists on and discover mmore planets and unravel secrets about the universe.

This is only one of the object being put forward recently as a 10th planet.
2003VB12 or Sedna is another one
Sedna
And here is another one called Quaoar.
Quaoar
No doubt as Mike Brown and his collegues continue to survey the Kuiper belt more such objects will be found.


The search for planets around other stars which turned up these water bearing planets may be more interesting to some people.
new planets

its cool and all.. but what a crappy name.... makes u think if intelegence in outher worlds do excist...

It doesn't really mean anything for us. We can't really live in it. We'll freeze to death!! That's obvious, isn't it?

Anyway, that planet shouldn't be called Lila or Lilah. They should name it after a Greek god because it would sound much cooler. I mean think of this.

Mercury: Rebecca
Venus: Lily
Earth: Thompson
Mars: Redhead-Billy
Saturn: Pringle (named after a dog or chips)
Jupiter: Eryk
Uranus: Son of Mask
Neptune: Milah
Pluto: Jilah
New Planet: Lilah

Bah, I would send hundreds of hatemails to the ones who name the planets as those!! I swear!!

Thats great to hear that there are planets out there... As we already know there should be millions of planets out there in millions of different galaxies... I think we should focus more on finding a way to visit these different planets first before we even look for more planets... To me there are no reason to discover more if we cant even travel to the planets nearby to earth... Possibly by having all scientists and researchers focus on one goal only that is to travel to the nearby planets, we would accomplish that in the near future... I think sometimes they are too focus about putting their name on the newly discoverred planets they forget everything comes in increments... To focus and research on traveling to nearby planets as a whole would possibly help us learn more in our life time, instead of waiting another hundreds or thousands of years to do anything beyond earth... Thats just my interpretation of all this.. it might be wrong... I would still congratulate all the scientists and researchers who had invested countless amount of effort into improving our lives and our future... Thanks...

Chin chin..

it might be true that these are just foreign objects, or when they were released, the gravity pull weakened, therefore causing the extra z axis.

There's really strange things that happens to the Universe as we're not the only ones.

xboxrulz

Just looking at some diagrams of the planet orbits (and now this new one)... It looks as though Pluto and this other new planet could just space debris caught by pure accident in our Sun's gravity. I mean, whenever or however the Universe was created, the first 8 Planets blew out of the center (the Sun) as sort of a flat disk (in relation to their orbits). Pluto kind of goes helter-skelter through Neptune's orbit at a slight angle, and this new planet is totally off in its own little world... so to speak.



Just using basic Physics, and using a X,Y,Z plane... if you put the first 8 orbits up, they would be parallel to the x,y plane, velocity in that plane. Pluto and this new planet have an additional Z velocity which is perpendicular to the x,y plane. Now, with forces, (if I can remember my college physics class, please correct me if I'm mistaken), the axis are independent when it comes to external forces. Let me give an example. You throw a ball in the air along a parabolic path.


^Truck is going at a constant horizontal speed, and as you can see, so is the ball, despite slowing down and speeding up vertically.

There are two dimensions here. X being horizontal, and Y being vertical. The force used to launch the ball can be broken down into those two components... A X force, and a Y force. When you change one, the other one is unaffected. This can be applied to a ball. Gravity is a force acting on it in the Y direction. It is pulling the ball down. The horizontal speed, velocity in the X (horizontal) direction, is not affected (unless by a second source of force such as wind resistance or a wall). The speed of the ball in the Y direction is affected due to the constant force of gravity causes accelleration in the vertical direction. When you think it's "suspended in mid-air" for that brief moment that it reaches the very top of the parabola, it is, in fact, still moving the exact same speed horizontally as it was the entire time...... If Pluto has an additional Z velocity, it would be comparable to having some force "hit" the ball as it flew through mid-air perpendicularly to the x,y plane (imagine sticking a pencil straight out from your computer screen, that's the Z axis compared to the left/right axis and up/down axis)


ANYWAY, the whole point of all this was that if whatever forces caused the first 8 planets to begin orbiting the sun, it was on a horizontal axis (x,y) these two planets furthest out have Z velocity. Since each component of force is independent, either these two planets hit something, or they were (in my opinion) hurtling through space from some other explosion at the beginning of the universe, and got caught at an angle, rotating in our solar system. So though they may still be planets, they may be planets from entirely different solar systems... Thus, exploration of these planets might be greatly beneficial as to determine how planets formed in other parts of the galaxy! Chemical makeup and whatnot.

Here's is a cool page on NASA's site on the planet. They have a 3D simulation of the orbiting planets:
http://neo.jpl.nasa..../2003ub313.html

Check it out, you'll see what I was talking about better in 3D.