A newly discovered cosmic object is not a planet, not a moon — but a third thing we don’t have a name for yet.
To me, this opening sentence summarizes the whole article. We shouldn’t expect to have handy, accurate, convenient labels for everything when we’ve only observed a tiny fraction of our own galactic “neighborhood”. Running into weird stuff is the entire point of exploration, and I love it!
Our classification is pretty straightforward - be big enough to be a sphere, big enough to dominate your orbit, be in orbit around the star
Too small to own the orbit? Dwarf planet
In orbit around a planet? Moon
This one orbits a star, it’s a planet
If it’s orbiting a star, it’s a planet. If it’s orbiting a planet, it’s a moon. If it’s orbiting nothing, it’s a target.
(This thing is a planet. It orbits a star. Doesn’t matter if that star orbits another star. By definition, it’s a planet.)
So what you’re saying is: that’s no moon
This is a lot of hype to say that a planet, an object which orbits a star, is a planet. Anyone who has been seriously looking at stars and thinking about what makes up the universe has come to the conclusion that the thing that orbits a star (and has all the other criteria of a planet) is a planet, even if the star it’s orbiting also orbits another star.
Likewise, the idea that a moon can have a moon has been discussed. The problem is that the rules for what constitutes a moon make it hard for that to happen so, given the size of the Milky Way, there’s probably a number of examples out there.
We could call objects orbiting moons, moonies!
We could name an award after it!
Oh, wait…
Well I say we go out there and twat it!
One knee in the happy sacks, it’ll drop like anyone else!
We can’t even decide if brown dwarfs are stars or gas giants so I say we shelve this debate until we solve that one.
And then there were eight
