Tuesday 21 February 2017

Make The Moon A Planet

Once there were nine planets in our solar system and then there were eight and now a group of NASA scientists think there should be at least 110 planets moving around the sun.
The New Horizons project which visited and beamed back amazing photographs of the Planet formerly known as Pluto have been peeved that the last stop before the Kuiper Belt now downgraded to a minor planet in 2006 and are trying to get the definition of how we define a planet changed but in order to do that it would also mean bringing over 100 large rocky bodies into the Planet Club including our own Moon.
As it stands a planet is a body that orbits the Sun, is massive enough for its own gravity to make it round, and has cleared its neighbourhood of smaller objects around its orbit but the NASA team think that it should be upgraded to include anything that has 'sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape' so basically anything that's big and round and isn't a star.
The proposal isn't getting much approval with the rest of NASA who are happy with their eight planets so it is doubtful it will happen which will come as great relief for schoolchildren everywhere who seem to have enough problem remembering the order of the eight we have so would have no chance with 110 of them.

No comments: