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To: Alberta's Child
I'm going with the "no longer a planet" defense, but you have an excellent point:

Though the sum of the masses of Pluto and Charon is known pretty well (it can be determined from careful measurements of the period and radius of Charon's orbit and basic physics) the individual masses of Pluto and Charon are difficult to determine because that requires determining their mutual motions around the center of mass of the system which requires much finer measurements -- they're so small and far away that even HST has difficulty. The ratio of their masses is probably somewhere between 0.084 and 0.157; more observations are underway but we won't get really accurate data until a spacecraft is sent.


82 posted on 07/21/2009 9:04:41 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets (AGWT is very robust with respect to data. All observations confirm it at the 100% confidence level.)
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To: Lonesome in Massachussets

Good point. Pluto is such an odd case that it may not even be a “planet” in any sense of the word.


94 posted on 07/21/2009 9:37:21 AM PDT by Alberta's Child (God is great, beer is good . . . and people are crazy.)
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