What asteroids were called

[mmcirvin]

This history of the naming of asteroids is really good. It's clear from this that the current situation with Pluto and the Kuiper Belt is almost a replay of the nomenclature confusion over the main belt asteroids in the early 19th century.

As Scott Westerfeld pointed out shortly after being eaten by Great Cthulhu, that process ended with none of the asteroids having the status of planet, though the term "minor planet" is still occasionally used today. And it was even somewhat less ambiguous, in that Ceres was both the first main-belt asteroid discovered, the largest, and the one with by far the best claim to being a planet (look at it!) It will be interesting if the debate over Pluto's status ends up with Ceres re-declared a planet as well.

Comments

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Keerist, is that really the best picture of Ceres we have? What year is it, 1973?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Patience patience. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Mission)

That historical page pointed out that whether people thought of the asteroids as planets or "minor planets" may have affected their assumptions about the objects' sizes. It's probably affected allocation of resources for research as well: if Ceres is thought of as just an asteroid, then you'd want to send probes to the most convenient asteroids rather than to Ceres specifically. And that's pretty much what's happened: the first asteroids to be imaged close up were flybys of convenience by probes that were going somewhere else (the first was Gaspra, which the Galileo spacecraft saw in 1991), and others were near-Earth bodies.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, you'd think we could just point the Hubble at it or something.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

That WAS the Hubble.

Ceres is only 900-something km wide, and considerably further away than Mars at closest approach.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

BAH.

[factitiouslj.livejournal.com]

One idea that interests me is restricting "planet" to things that account for the majority of the mass in their orbit. So Ceres, which only has about a third of the mass in the asteroid belt, would be ruled out, as would Pluto. That way, we end up with just the eight most obvious planets, but it feels kind of ad hoc.

And on pruning it down even more than that, have you seen Charles Stross' take on all this?

[(Anonymous)]

I'll put in yet another plug for the solution I've taken to using (IAU or no IAU): drop the unqualified term "planet" altogether, and just use "major planet" for the big eight and "planetesimal" for everything else. (Although I must confess to a certain fondness for Charlie Stross's suggestion of "irritating little shit".)