How can Pluto be less than a planet if it has a moon(s)? Seems to me Pluto should be reinstated to planet status, returning our Solar System to nine.
Here here!
Or is that Hear hear!
I think some people freaked out at the idea of our tidy little system being filled with maybe 15 planets.
It was silly to yank it from Pluto because it’s too small seeing that we have systems with worlds 4 times Jupiter’s size, orbiting half the distance of the Sun to Mercury in 10 hours.
Planets come in so many styles, it is dumb to limit it just yet.
The trouble with that is quite a lot of the asteroids have moons as well - at least sixty or seventy of them last time I looked. It's not that uncommon - some of the sizeable asteroids have moons larger than the moons of Mars.
1. Apparently there are asteroids that have moons.
2. Pluto is less than 70% the diameter of Earth's moon and has only 1/6 the mass of our moon. In contrast, Mercury at least has a mass 4 1/2 times that of our moon.
3. Pluto isn't even the biggest "dwarf planet" and there may be a very large number of these in the outer solar system.
4. The Wikipedia article on dwarf planets is interesting and covers some of the controversies surrounding the new classifications.