Ok so we have 50 planets?

I mean, why not?

It would make the mnemonic for memorizing the order of the planets very long and difficult for the children to remember.

My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nachos

	▲	tapotatonumber9 a day ago \| parent \| next [-]
		… Picante?
	▲	ageedizzle a day ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Nature doesn’t care about what kids can or cannot easily remember.

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mr_toad 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Fifty is an undercount by many orders of magnitude. Several thousand TNOs have been cataloged, there are probably millions of them.

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[deleted]

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sandworm101 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Yes. I wouldn't call a dwarf person any less of a person, nor would i refer to a dwarf planet as being any less a planet. Between the terrestrial planets, the gas giants, the ice giants, and arguably a couple of rounder moons, we have far more than 50 planets in our solar system.

By some extreme definitions, Earth might not be a planet. Some say the moon is too big to qualify the earth "cleared out its orbit" criteria, making Earth-moon some sort of double planet... like Pluto-Charon.

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GolfPopper a day ago | parent | next [-]

Setting aside the whole "demote Pluto" and "dwarf planet" aspects, I find it amusing that we use the same term for small rocky Mercury (2,440 km radius, 5% of Earth's mass) and immense gaseous Jupiter (69,000 km radius, over 300 times Earth's mass). Only we don't, of course. Jupiter is a gas giant, while Mercury is a rocky planet, or iron planet; there's a lot of 'planet' terminology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_planet_types

	▲	cogman10 a day ago \| parent [-]
		It gets even weird when you consider Ganymede which is larger than mercury but not a planet because it's a moon.

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fc417fc802 a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Ultimately these sorts of quibbles are fundamentally semantic in nature thus (in general) entirely pointless. It's only the subjects themselves - the myriad celestial bodies - that are interesting.

	▲	interestica a day ago \| parent [-]
		It's semantics as well as a collision with our inability to work with gradients. We can look at two colours and can name the discrete ones - but when does red stop being red? When does a species emerge?