Mercury not a Planet?

[Kyle]

Should Mercury be a planet, because if Pluto gets Demoted then Mercury should for very similar Reasons.

Negative reasons
1.) Mercury has an Elliptical orbit around the sun.
2.) There are moons bigger than Mercury (Titan, Callisto, Ganymede)

Positive reasons
1.) Mercury has cleared its orbit of any derbies.
2.) would upset the School children to the point of Civil War :lol:

Mercury for all we know could be just a large captured Asteroid from the Main Belt, which also could very well explain why Mercury looks so much like the moon with all its Craters. Personally I say Keep Mercury as a planet, but if your Going to demote Pluto, Mercury nearly meets the definition of Dwarf Planet. Please, state your opinion.

 

[Urwumpe]

Point 1 on the positive side is not very solid, we can't do good asteroid surveys so close to the sun.

 

[Kyle]

Point 1 on the positive side is not very solid, we can't do good asteroid surveys so close to the sun.

Or the Sun has vaporized them being so close to the sun. They'd have to be much closer to the sun than Mercury however.

 

[Urwumpe]

Or the Sun has vaporized them being so close to the sun. They'd have to be much closer to the sun than Mercury however.

not really, there are even periodic sungrazers. there seem to be enough material for still having a population there.

 

[Kyle]

There is a slight possibility of 'Vulcan' Asteroids,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulcanoid_asteroid

 

[pete.dakota]

AFAIK -- considering the IAU adopted 2006 definition -- there is no limit given size or mass for an object to be considered a dwarf planet. However, any object larger than Mercury is likely to have cleared its neighbourhood of asteroids, would assume hydrostatic equilibrium, and so should be considered a fully fledged planet.

Mercury does have the most eccentric orbit of all the planets and is smaller than some moons. These should only be considered attributes, though -- not reasons to demote another planet for the sake it.

 

[ryan]

And Mercury is one of the two planets to have traces of oxygen.

 

[Spaced]

And a magnetic field.

 

[agentgonzo]

The reasons that led to the IAU decision to classify a planet and thus demote Pluto was because as time went on and our instrumentation got better, we started discovering a lot of objects that were very similar to Pluto in the Kuiper Belt. As time progressed, we realised that Pluto was nothing special and just one of many objects out there. The only thing that set Pluto apart was the fact that for ages it was the only thing we had found out that far, and that it was the largest KBO that we had found. For a long time, the vast majority of the scientific community didn't consider Pluto a planet anymore. When we discovered Eris, it gave the reason to reclassify Pluto as not a planet. (IMO, the classification of 'dwarf planet' was set up deliberately to placate the people who wanted Pluto to remain a planet for historical reasons).

The same thing happened to Pallas, Vesta, Juno and Ceres in the asteroid belt in the 1850s.


None of these reasons apply to Mercury.