Astronomy and Astrophysics – Astronomy
Scientific paper
May 2009
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2009aas...21423707w&link_type=abstract
American Astronomical Society, AAS Meeting #214, #237.07; Bulletin of the American Astronomical Society, Vol. 41, p.740
Astronomy and Astrophysics
Astronomy
Scientific paper
As philosopher George Santayana famously said, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." The professional astronomy community, as embodied in the IAU, now suffers from Santayana's malady. Ceres was expelled from the community of planets because it apparently was not a planet; yet, no working, scientifically reasonable definition of the word planet existed in the early nineteenth century and so no rational basis existed for excluding or including Ceres or, for that matter, Uranus or the soon-to-be-discovered Neptune from the family of planets. Instead, William Herschel disparaged Ceres as only an "asteroid," a term he invented specifically to separate Ceres and Pallas and Vesta from the true planets. Clearly, in Herschel's view, Ceres was not big enough, and apparently, to Herschel, size mattered. So how big is big enough and by what method was size put in place as the critical scientific metric for assessing planethood? Certainly, as members of the newly discovered asteroid belt, the newly identified asteroids were members of a previously unknown family of objects in the solar system. But why did that make these non-classically known objects asteroids but not planets rather than asteroids and planets? Uranus and Neptune were also members of a newly identified and previously unknown family of solar system objects that we now call "ice giants." On what basis were these two objects embraced as planets and why have these two non-classical objects become known as ice giants and planets rather than ice giants but not planets? Perhaps our scientific predecessors were too quick to render judgment, as they lacked the scientific context in which to understand the many new objects discovered during the years 1781 to 1846. Is that a lesson from the past that we might remember today?
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