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moi621 (imported) wrote: Wed Jun 29, 2011 7:12 pm Feels like being told the new kitty/puppy replaces the one lost.

"

Yup. They should call it Ernie (the fourth son on My Three Sons, who replaced the one who grew up and married Meredith Baxter) or Oliver (the bespectacled blond moppet in a later season of The Brady Bunch, a stray kid the family picked up and could not scrape off their collective shoes).

janekane (imported) wrote: Fri Jul 01, 2011 1:06 pm Were it not for implacable tradition, would classifying the Earth and Moon as a binary planet, based on plausible origin notions and relative mass, be another way to get back to 9 planets without including Tyche or Pluto/Charon?

It is a brilliant suggestion, but I wonder if only an astronomer or a first-person witness to a solar eclipse would think of it as a binary-planet and not earth/moon.

Bring back ur-anus!

Bring back ur-anus!

I think you just did.

BTW

binary planet system, what percent of mass do you think the smaller companion mass should have in relation to the larger to qualify as a binary planet system and not a "moon".

I was never, even as a kid, comfortable with calling relatively iddy biddy things circling a planet a, moon, like Earth's moon. The discovery of Pluto's moon, Charon set it in my mind. Binary planet systems. We can still call our planetary companion, "Moon". Let it be reclassified as a "companion planet" in a binary planet system rather then a mere, moon.

When they get that right, achieving Pluto/Charon binary planet system status should be a cinch.

And of course we name them off by the major planet so -

basic order has been restored to the universe;

Sun: then the planets, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

So what does it take to be a binary planet system?

Moi