![]() Why rehash old news? Because there was a new article by Mike Wall that was published yesterday at Yahoo News (see it here) that asks if the decision to classify Pluto as a dwarf planet is correct based on information we have today. I can handle promotions better than demotions. You might also notice that 1 Ceres, formerly viewed an asteroid in the asteroid belt, is now listed as a dwarf planet. Stop by the Wolfram site and check it out here. There is a lot more information about the dwarf planets than is shown in this screen capture. I went to the Wolfram Alpha website and did a search on dwarf planets and received a list of 5 that includes Pluto: In the words of the IAU, Pluto and Eris fail to qualify as planets and so they are now classified as dwarf planets. “ A celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.” The International Astronomical Union (IAU) met in 2006 and decided the criteria that determines if a body is a planet (original text available from the IAU website) is: This discovery raised the issue of the definition to accurately describe planets. Back in 2005, CalTech Professor Mike Brown discovered Eris, a Pluto-sized planet 9 billion miles from the sun (twice as far away as Pluto) and about the same size as Pluto. I’ve been an amateur astronomer many years, and my schools taught that our solar system has 9 planets. How can you beat that?īy Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2010, All Rights Reserved. I am amazed how little effort it takes to create a widget and hope our readers will explore this aspect of Wolfram|Alpha.Įasy, fun, useful, and free. The only thing I’d mention is that I was unable to embed my widget on this site – I don’t host my own copy of WordPress and had not found a way to be able to add it with my current configuration. Watch the demo video, then create your own widget for yourself or for others. You have to check this out – go to Wolfram’s site and look at all of the available widgets. I saved my widget with the name Planets in Our Solar System, and you can check it out in the Astronomy section of the Wolfram website at. I entered Jupiter and tested it, and it worked – a lot of good data, Jupiter’s current location in the solar system, and a picture of the largest planet in the solar system. After seeing my query retrieved information on all of the planets (including images), I created the widget but changed planets to a variable so users can specify a planet of their choice. If the site understands the query, it returns the requested data. I then just tried ‘planets’ and it worked exactly as I hoped.Īll you have to do is decide what type of data you want to retrieve and then enter that into the Wolfram|Alpha site. I tried some code I wrote that runs in a Mathematica workbook (it retrieves images of the 8 planets in our solar system) but it didn’t work. He then showed how easy it is to change the color of the widget, to set the widget titlebar, and a description for users.īeing an amateur astronomer, the choice of topic for my widget was simple. After retrieving the information, the speaker showed it is simple to replace the names of the initial cities with variables, and it is easy to add custom labels for the variables. The demo example retrieved the distance between two cities. So clear I wondered if it really was as easy as it was portrayed in the video. I’m a developer, so I decided to build a widget.īefore getting started I decided to watch the demo video from Wolfram and it is very clear. You can download API documentation, download a widget for your website or blog, or build your own widget. Then I noticed the Developer Products menu at the top and checked it out. I checked out the Music Theory app and it was $1.99 at iTunes. There are three new Wolfram Course Assistance Apps for students ( Algebra, Calculus, and Music Theory) but more are planned for a lot of other courses. Thomas account about the new Wolfram mobile apps for the iPhone/iTouch/iPad and Android, so I went to their site to see what they had to offer. By Mike Hubbartt, © Copyright 2011, All Rights Reserved.
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