I wrote my previous blogpost before I read that day's paper, in which the astronomers' decision/criteria for demoting Pluto was reported. I think they screwed it all up by positing an idiotic distinction between "planets" and "dwarf planets." What's the point? That's like calling uranium atom a full atom because it has scores of protons, neutrons, and electrons, and a hydrogen atom a "dwarf atom" because it only has a single proton and a single electron. They both embody the core structure of the same class of objects, but differ primarily according to scale (one's much larger than the other, and has the structural differences associated with that larger scale, but they're brethren in the periodic table). Absurd.
The core distinction that the astronomers should have keyed on was the scale of orbs, and the structural properties that come with increasing scale. I touched on that in my blogpost, but I thought of a few additional structural properties of larger orbs. Here they all are:
- Appear: larger orbs tend to be more visible to our eyes and/or telescopes
- Clear: larger orbs tend to clear out their orbital paths through centripetal gravitation and collisional deflection
- Commandeer: larger orbs tend to capture other orbs and lock them as satellite into perpetual slave orbits
- Sphere: larger orbs tend to take on spherical shape from force of own gravity
- Atmosphere: larger orbs tend have the gravity necessary to hold any gaseous emissions as perpetual atmospheres
- Magnetosphere: larger orbs tend to have hotter, more liquid interiors that generate the ongoing magnetic fields that cause such phenomena as atmospheric auroras
I rather like the "phase-change" ring structure I proposed for the solar system as a whole, because it essentially defines "strata" into which orbs have settled due to the dynamics of the whole system's evolution. It occurred to me that there's one critical ring that I left out from my blogpost (apologies to the late Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash on the following):
- Ring of Fire: one or more fiery orbs (i.e., suns) at the heart of the system; a single fiery orb is essentially a rotating ring around the center of gravity of the system as a whole; this ring structure is more apparent in a binary-star or multi-star system, in which all those orbs orbit around the common center of gravity; it's even more apparent when we look at the billions of fiery orbs that revolve around the center of gravity (i.e., black hole) at the heart of the galaxy
- Ring of Rock: one or more rocky orbs (with/without their own ice, liquid/ocean and gas/atmosphere overlays and satellites)
- Ring of Gas: one or more gaseous orbs (with/without their own rock, gas, and/or ice satellites)
- Ring of Ice: one or more icy orbs (with/without their own rock and/or gas constituents and/or satellites)
There. I'm glad I was able to write that all down in one coherent place. I don't care what these orbs get named, or whether they are ever named. Have we named all the stars in the universe? Why should we? Isn't it better to simply open our minds to understanding them on their own terms?
Jim
