Planets September 15, 2006
Posted by rharbour in Uncategorized.add a comment
Recently planets have been a major conversation among scientists. A while ago the planet Pluto lost it’s planet status and has been renamed 134340 and is now a ”dwarf planet” instead of a planet. The reason is because a recent meeting by over 2,500 astronomers decided what exactly a planet was and Pluto did not meet the requirements. The new and first definition of a planet is “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.” “Pluto doesn’t qualify because its orbit is inclined relative to the rest of the solar system and crosses over the orbit of Neptune.” This leaves our solar system with 8 planets instead of 9.
Along with Pluto’s demotion, a newly discovered planet called HAT-P-1 is said to be “both the largest and least dense of the nearly 200 worlds astronomers have found outside our own solar system.” And it is so light that astronmoers said it would be able to float on water if there was such body of water. Also, our planet obviously takes a year to fully orbit the sun but this one takes about 4.5 days to fully orbit it’s star. That means if i lived there i would be almost 1460 years old if 1 orbit = 1 year. “Astronomers used a network of telescopes in Arizona and Hawaii to discover the planet. Its parent star is too faint to see with the naked eye but can be spied with binoculars.”
