Archives for the 'planets' Category
Defining Planets (Part X)
Published on 10 Mar 2009 at 3:03 pm.
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I’m still busy with mid-semester paperwork, so I have not had time to blog much.
This is going to be my final entry (for now) on the defining planets series. Would you have believed when I started this a month ago that it would wind up being ten postings? This is a very difficult topic. It […]
Read ‘Defining Planets (Part X)’
Defining Planets (Part IX)
Published on 3 Mar 2009 at 4:39 pm.
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I’ve been mired in paperwork at the college, so I have been slow blogging. Here we are, though, in Part Nine of this series, and I still have some more to write about!
I spent all of February covering aspects of what may go into a definition of the term planet. If you are new to […]
Read ‘Defining Planets (Part IX)’
Defining Planets (Part VIII)
Published on 24 Feb 2009 at 7:41 pm.
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All month long, I have been posting about the definition of the term planet, and I still have not come up with a definitive definition. That suggests that either I am really slow, or else I am trying to be thorough and that this is not an easy thing to define. I rather […]
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Defining Planets (Part VII)
Published on 23 Feb 2009 at 2:46 pm.
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In my previous installment of this series, I wrote about the role that structure may have in defining planet. It would seem that differentiated bodies would be different from non-differentiated bodies. However, differentiation is difficult to determine simply by looking at a potential planet. In fact, it has been proposed that even […]
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Defining Planets (Part VI)
Published on 19 Feb 2009 at 11:27 pm.
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The next installment of my series is to look at whether planets and non-planets can have a difference in structure that helps to distinguish them apart. So, that means that we need to know the structure of a planet. That is not as easy as it sounds.
It took a long time before geologists […]
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Defining Planets (Part V)
Published on 14 Feb 2009 at 4:43 pm.
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In my last posting, I talked about mass and size as possible discriminators for planets. The size issue was one of the first arguments put forth to remove the asteroids from the list of planets. But, as I point out, there are some problems with simply using mass and size. So, perhaps […]
Read ‘Defining Planets (Part V)’
Defining Planets (Part IV)
Published on 9 Feb 2009 at 10:29 pm.
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The very first definition for planet was simply to designate a celestial body that appeared to move in the sky as a planet. But, that was ultimately deemed insufficient once telescopes discovered more bodies. The first satellites discovered of Jupiter and Saturn were called planets. But, astronomers eventually decided to restrict the […]
