troll?

if not, GRRR



This post was edited by infinitesimal on Dec 15 2009 11:35pm

no seriously, the oort cloud is theorized to be up to 5 billion miles from the sun.
how is something going clear out its orbit when comets are flying around from neptune to the very edge of the suns gravitational pull?
though its obviously not as dense as the kuiper belt (sp?), i still dont see how a planet, by its current definition, could exist beyond neptune.

This post was edited by Kamikizzle on Dec 16 2009 12:13am

If you consider Pluto or Xena a planet, then we actually have about 5,000 planets in our solar system.

The kiper Belt

the items in the kuiper belt are nothing close to the size of pluto, our moon or mercury. the size regulation when judging whether it is a planet varies depending on distance from the sun. mercury is smaller than our moon, but is considered a planet because it formed in the same manner as the rest of the planets -forming from gas circling the sun.

our moon formed long after earth formed, likely from an extremely large impact that cast dust from earth into space, it went into orbit and slowly gathered and formed our moon -out of debris circling earth, which circles the sun, which circles the center of the milky way. this is likely how pluto formed unless it came from another solar system.

i think the rules for determining whether a planet or not make sense, you just have to read into them a bit.

This post was edited by juliusjuice on Dec 16 2009 09:36pm

mercury is bigger than our moon
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_(planet)
Mean radius 2,439.7

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon
Mean radius 1,737.10 km

a planet as defined by the iau is a celestial body whose gravity causes it to be more or less spherical, and clears out its respective orbit. distance from the sun has nothing to do with it

p.s. there are several known kuiper bell objects that are comparable to plutos size as well as one or two dwarf planets in the main astroid belt

This post was edited by Kamikizzle on Dec 16 2009 11:12pm

Yeah I do not understand why the discarded it.

because if pluto is considered a panet theyd be adding new ones every few years because new ones keep getting discovered