Young John Deacon (who studied electronics at college) Posted on 08/29/2019 9:19:58 PM PDT by DoodleBob
You might not care what Keith Richards or Jimmy Page think about Pluto's status as a dwarf planet, but when Queen guitarist Brian May speaks up about it, it's worth a listen.
May, who received his doctorate in astrophysics in 2007, posted his Pluto thoughts on Instagram late Wednesday after hearing about how NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine still thinks of Pluto as a full-on planet.
The International Astronomical Union (IAU) tightened up its definition of a planet in 2006 and demoted Pluto to dwarf-planet status, sparking an ongoing debate that just won't rest. May is on the pro-planet side of the argument.
"Pluto was discovered and named as a planet awhile before I was born," May wrote on Instagram. "At that time it was generally instinctively understood that a planet was one of a family of roughly spherical objects that orbited the sun (rather than orbiting something else)."
(Excerpt) Read more at cnet.com ...
Chemical composition: Pluto probably consists of a mixture of 70 percent rock and 30 percent water ice. Internal structure: The dwarf planet probably has a rocky core surrounded by a mantle of water ice, with more exotic ices such as methane, carbon monoxide and nitrogen ice coating the surface.Nov 14, 2017
As normal, Tyson is wrong. The rocky core would remain intact and quite happily circle the sun.
Sorry. I'm just hate the world. Going to decompress in my flower garden...then maybe have a cup of tea and listen to some Queen.
Simple rule: If it’s large enough so covalently bonded matter (rock) in its interior would be crushed into a round shape.
(This is a simpler version of one of three criteria currently used, which is hydrostatic equilibrium (HE). HE is useful for ice and gas planets, but not rock planets because geographic features on the surface of rock planets aren’t technically in a state of HE.)
If Pluto hasn’t “cleared its orbit,” the same can be said for Neptune.
Why the bizarrely complex standard? Because after decades of insisting there were no other planets around the Sun, astronomers discovered two more. So before announcing their discovery, they changed the definition of planet.
This rule is simpler, but not much neater than the the current rule: Ceres, an asteroid almost as large as all other asteroids combined, would fit the definition of a planet. And ice planets would be judged to be planets based on comparison to rock planets, not on any intrinsic property of the planet. On the other hand, this standard requires no guesswork about whether an object is in HE, none of the ambiguity about Neptune and Pluto, and the current theory rests its definition so heavily on the entire star system that there’s so little sense of intrinsic properties of the planet it’s not certain if the definition will mean anything in tiny or enormous systems.
Trivia: Freddie Mercury was bisexual
May is on the pro-planet side of the argument.
Good for him. That is the right side in my book.
If it wasn’t for idiot astronomer Neil Tyson, it would still be a planet. Tyson is NOT a planetary scientist FYI.
I might be wrong about this but he is not ape sh*t crazy on climate change to my knowledge either.
He advocates for things like banning fox hunting, not impoverishing non-Chinese/Muslim countries like the ‘RATS.
Young John Deacon (who studied electronics at college) May scored 10 “O-levels” and three “A-levels” in the (formerly great) British equivalent of high school.
That means he was really, really smart, even as a kid.
We should fly to Pluto and ask it what it identifies as...seems like an important mission to me.
Oh, one thing I forgot. A British doctorate isn’t as high an honor (honour?) as a ‘Murrikin PhD because their system awards the doctorate for demonstrated life experience and achievement. It doesn’t require that you put in the post-Masters classroom time, then write and defend a dissertation, like in ‘Murrikah. I have English friends who came here to get their PhDs because it was better respected in Europe than the British equivalent.
Ok I’ll bite! Who is John Deacon?
I still find it funny that Sledge and Fubar from “The Pacific” wound in in Queen all those years later, LOL!
He is the bass player for Queen, so there are two in Queen who resemble Sir Isaac Newton (in my opinion), and both are intelligent and have scientific interests.
Per Wikipedia:
“He became interested in electronics, reading magazines on the subject and building small devices, including the modification of a reel-to-reel tape deck to record music directly from the radio. He studied well and achieved 8 GCE O level and 3 A level passes, all at grade A.”
Why, because it’s kind of a gigantic loosely-packed icy dirt clod?
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"To Pluto And Far Beyond" By David H. Levy, Parade, January 15, 2006 -- We don't have a dictionary definition yet that includes all the contingencies. In the wake of the new discovery, however, the International Astronomical Union has set up a group to develop a workable definition of planet. For our part, in consultation with several experienced planetary astronomers, Parade offers this definition: A planet is a body large enough that, when it formed, it condensed under its own gravity to be shaped like a sphere. It orbits a star directly and is not a moon of another planet.
"To Pluto And Far Beyond" By David H. Levy, Parade, January 15, 2006 -- We don't have a dictionary definition yet that includes all the contingencies. In the wake of the new discovery, however, the International Astronomical Union has set up a group to develop a workable definition of planet. For our part, in consultation with several experienced planetary astronomers, Parade offers this definition: A planet is a body large enough that, when it formed, it condensed under its own gravity to be shaped like a sphere. It orbits a star directly and is not a moon of another planet.
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