I'm getting a little uncomfortable answering your questions at this point because I don't want to say something incorrect and I'm not an expert. The expansion is currently 77 kilometers per second per megaparsec, but this number is getting bigger with time. i'm not sure how fast that is at the edges of the univese because i don't know how many megaparsecs that is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's going the speed of light or close to it...in which case the answer is, you can't go faster.
Ok that's fine. Maybe I should ask someone in the science and maths. After all this is "ask an expert"
The key thing is for an object to be considered a planet it has to have cleared it's orbit - absorbing or slingshotting away other things in the orbit.
Pluto lives in what we now know to be a fairly heavily populated part of the solar system. It is really just one of a whole series of objects in the Kuiper belt, and has not by a long chalk mopped up all the objects around it in the way that the 8 planets have.
CJ wrote
Quote:The key thing is for an object to be considered a planet it has to have cleared it's orbit - absorbing or slingshotting away other things in the orbit.
Pluto lives in what we now know to be a fairly heavily populated part of the solar system. It is really just one of a whole series of objects in the Kuiper belt, and has not by a long chalk mopped up all the objects around it in the way that the 8 planets have.
Can you be more specific?
x
Ow, I thought that I'd made it really simple for the average non-scientists like ourselves, Dorothy.
I'm going out now so I'll have to look into it later.
X
Pluto is more like an asteroid than a planet.
To me it doesn't really matter what NASA defines as a planet. It's like defining cold. It's a matter of opinion.
However, it was not NASA which made this decision--it was the International Astronomical Union. That happens to constitute quite an acute example of highly-informed opinion.
NASA, IAU, they're all the same. It doesn't matter whose opinion it is, the fact is it's still an opinion.
The proposition that all opinion holds essentially the same weight couldnt be more erroneous.
What I'm trying to say, is that it's not a definite thing.
aperson,
you are technically wrong here. it's not an opinion at all. it's simply a definition of a word. we have a clear definition of what the word "planet" means now -- we didn't before. what classifies as a planet is no longer a matter of opinion. it's that simple.
Well fine then, but they're all party poopers.
At the same time, there was another propostion to immeadiately include three new planets. 2003UB[size=7]131[/size] (Xena), Ceres and Charon would have been made planets according to the draft proposition, but they later changed it.
no, that was the same proposition. they were not debating about which ones to call planets, they were debating about what the definition of a planet would be. those are just other objects whose designations might have changed under the proposed new classification.
