Blog, Standard (Qty: 1)

Paragon of middle-shelf mediocrity

[boudlo]

[stellarsteppe]

The Santa Maria Manuela, a four-masted gaff-rigged schooner. Built as part of the Portuguese White Fleet to fish for cod off of the Grand Banks. Now refitted for passengers, supporting environmental surveys and conducting multi-day cruises.

[vacuously-true]

You know how there's like some mathematician or something, who like did some useful stuff but is primarily known for overshadowing that work by going to great lengths trying to convince people to blow up the moon or something?

I wanna be like that but the hill I'm dying on is that the moon should be considered a planet

[vacuously-true]

Stop tagging this about the Unabomber it's not about the Unabomber, it's about time we give the other fucked up mathematicians some recognition, it's about this fucking guy

[hereticalteapot]

OP you're right and you should say it. There are 9 planets in the solar system and two of them are in a binary planetary system. I will die on this hill.

[vacuously-true]

EXACTLY. EARTH-MOON IS A BINARY PLANET SYSTEM. AND I WILL BECOME NOTABLE FOR MY FREQUENT POSTS TO VARIOUS TUMBLR BLOGS AND MY ADVOCACY FOR THE RECOGNITION OF THE MOON AS A PLANET.

[hereticalteapot]

Now, dear reader, you might say: "But three of the Jovian moons and Titan are bigger than the Moon!". And to that I say yes, but two of those are bigger than Mercury also and people aren't usually upset about that. Plus all of those are satellites of bodies that are completely incomparable in scale.

Ganymede, the biggest moon in the solar system, is 0.008% the mass of Jupiter. The Moon is a bit over 1.2% of Earth's mass and a solid 27% of its radius. There's no other planet* in the solar system with a satellite anywhere close to the kind of similarity in size that the Earth-Moon system has.

You might also say "Fine but it's literally called 'The Moon' so that's a bit silly". To which I say that I've been calling it that to be more easily understood but it would be extremely easy to switch to calling it "Luna" which is what most people do when they encounter situations where saying "The Moon" creates ambiguity - like when writing sci-fi or a nontrivial amount of astronomical research.

In conclusion, lumping Luna in with the satellites of other bodies is unhelpful because it is geophysically distinct from most of them, and orbitally distinct from all of them. Luna is a planet and it's rad that we can see one so clearly in the night sky.

[*No, Pluto is not a planet, but yes Pluto-Charon is totally a dwarf planet binary]

[stellarsteppe]

"The Moon is not a moon" is approaching "Stonehenge is not a henge" levels of linguistic fuckery.

I agree: the Moon can be a planet. But then we have to agree other satellites aren't moons. They have to come up with their own name for their new club.