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BREAKNG NEWS
August 24, 2006
Pluto Demoted; We're Down to 8 Planets
Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930.

Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell — a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings — urged those who might be “quite disappointed” to look on the bright side.

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight “classical” planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Much-maligned Pluto doesn’t make the grade under the new rules for a planet: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

The decision at a conference of 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries was a dramatic shift from just a week ago, when the group’s leaders floated a proposal that would have reaffirmed Pluto’s planetary status and made planets of its largest moon and two other objects.

That plan proved highly unpopular, splitting astronomers into factions and triggering days of sometimes combative debate that led to Pluto’s undoing.

Now, two of the objects that at one point were cruising toward possible full-fledged planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed “Xena.”

Brown was pleased by the decision. He had argued that Pluto and similar bodies didn’t deserve planet status, saying that would “take the magic out of the solar system.”
Detroit Free Press


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Astronomers Display the "Magic of the Solar System"
Category: MOVIES
By: Pete Kendall, August 24, 2006
Music of the spheres, indeed.
The Wave Principle

pluto

Looks like (at least for now) the solar system officially has a Fibonacci eight planets.

(I am reminded of a section in one of your Socionomics books that stated that some ancient mathemeticians/astronomers predicted the existence of eight planets without the use of telescopes.)
--Wes Masuda

This one has a little of everything from our perspective. In addition to reducing the field to a Fibonacci 8 as you suggest, there’s elements of conflict “dissenters plan a counteroffensive,” deflation and the overturning of a scientific consensus that held through every bit of the Supercycle V (1932-2000). The vote is being hailed as “a victory of scientific reasoning over historic and cultural influences.” And then of course, there is the “dramatic shift” from a expanding solar system of 12 planets just a few days ago to a contracting one of 8. Why the sudden urge to come to a scientifically consistent consensus? We can only think of one. Scientists are not immune to the reality the contracting social forces that are now unfolding. They are taking the opportunity to re-define the solar system even though it means abandoning a “sentimental” attachment to Pluto. A similar demotion happened once before. Ceres was officially listed as a planet when it was discovered in 1801. A half century later, however, when a large-degree bear market, Supercyle (II), was in force, Ceres was busted down to the rank of planetoid. So, it appears to be true; there really is nothing new under the sun.

As for the reference you mentioned, I can’t seem to find it. But Additional References below covers some more cosmic Fibonacci relationships.  

Additional References

The Wave Principle of Human Social Behavior
Fibonacci in the Heavens
If Linde’s description of the universe is accurate, then the universe is a branching structure. That branching structure could be an arborum. As shown in Chapter 3, arbora reflect phi both in the multiplication of their arba and in the most common angle of furcation, 36 degrees.

Behind Einasto’s description of the arrangement of superclusters as being like “a cosmic crystal” lies the possibility that their arrangement may actually be like a quasi-crystal. In the early 1980s, Daniel Shechtman of Technion in Haifa, Israel, discovered a type of crystal that contains spiral arrangements and is governed by Fibonacci mathematics. Initially believed impossible, the quasi-crystal has been verified by photographs made with an electron microscope. The quasi-crystal exhibits “five-fold symmetry,” which means that a single rotation of the crystal exposed to an X-ray produces a symmetrical scattering pattern five times.

While these are pure speculations, there is some concrete evidence of Fibonacci mathematics at work in our solar system. The September/October 1989 issue of Cycles magazine reports that the solar sunspot cycle of 10.88 years is skewed in time so that the average time from maximum to minimum sunspot activity is 6.80 years and the average time from there back to maximum activity is 4.08 years.15 The ratios of each phase to the whole cycle are .625 and .375, which are 5/8 and 3/8, ratios of Fibonacci numbers.

While there is considerable latitude in the ratios (.547, .656, .724 and .536), it is also the case that the average mean ratios of the distances of adjacent planets among the first six planets from the sun, excluding the Mars/Jupiter relationship, is .615, the Fibonacci ratio. The Mars/Jupiter separation is so great as to imply by this numerology that there is a missing planet between them. That is where the asteroids are located. The Titius-Bode Law, developed in 1766, recognized these relationships and correctly predicted the position of the next planet, Uranus.

In 1986, The New York Times printed a picture of the ten-mile-long nucleus of Halley’s comet. An alert subscriber of mine noted its skewed appearance, measured its two lengths and found that they are in Fibonacci relationship.

The Elliott Wave Principle
Besides their significant frequency, there is reason to believe that Fibonacci numbers and ratios of time units in the stock market are something other than numerology. For one thing, natural time units are related to the Fibonacci sequence. There are 365.24 days in a year, just shy of 377. There are 12.37 lunar cycles in a year, just shy of 13. The ratios between these actual numbers and Fibonacci numbers are .9688 and .9515. When the Earth’s orbit and rotation were faster, these numbers would have been concurrently quite close to actual Fibonacci numbers. (Might the solar system have begun its periodicities at those frequencies?)

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ARTICLE COMMENTS
Please send me more about The Elliott Wave Principle.
Posted by: ali
August 24, 2006 04:49 PM



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