Nothing like a bunch of planetary astronomers having at each other…the controversy is funny if you have ever hung out with these guys…not exactly the Sat. night wrestling gang. An event is considered scandalous, for example, if you publicize your comet siting second and thus don’t get your name on the comet. If the messages come into the Harvard-Smithsonian clearing house really close together, then, voilĂ„, comet Hale-Bopp. I am sure that Bopp wanted it to be Bopp-Hale.
@Andrew: I had to check what “clearing the neighborhood around its orbit” meant. That was new language to me.
To many of us, Pluto is still the beloved runt of the litter. Its orbit is more elliptical than the other 8 planets, and more tilted to the ecliptic (the path that the earth and the other 7 planets travel around the sun) than the other planets. Not too much is known about Pluto since it is really far away.But at times it is 17 degrees tilted to the ecliptic.
And as I am sure you are aware, even a three-body problem is bloody complicated. More will be known about what is going on out there in 2015, I think, when a probe of some kind ( aha -New Horizons Spacecraft) will arrive. Earth is c. 93 mil/miles from the sun; Plutos is c. 3.6 billion – not exactly around the corner.
It is 0 degrees here now, so I have a frozen brain too.