Since the moon is moving from the earth by few centimeters every year will it eventually fly away and if it does will make its own orbit around the sun and thus become a planet or will it fling it self into some other celestial object? Is this something that can be figured out?

It would eventually become a dwarf planet that way, but I believe the sun will go red giant before that could happen.

Hmm, if the moon did drift far enough away to cease being gravitationally bound to Earth wouldn't that make Earth a dwarf planet rather than a full planet (it wouldn't have cleared its orbital path).

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As I understand it, the moon will eventually stop receding and begin to come back towards Earth, never leaving its orbit, thusly never reaching even dwarf planetary status.

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Oh dear, not this again. Earth hasn't really cleared its orbit because of stuff like Apophis and its pals. Jupiter's got tons of trojan asteroids which means the orbit really isn't clear but Jupiter is relatively safe from being adversely affected by them. Pluto crosses Neptune's orbit with a 2:3 resonance.

Increasing the scope of the criticism, Tau Ceti has an enormous debris disk which may subject inferior planets to impacts or at least regular, nightly light shows which would put our humble meteor showers to shame. Would those objects be defined as planets even if they're constantly bombarded?

This definition isn't about to be changed any time soon AFAIK.

Also I don't believe that the moon's just going to "fly away" like in Space 1999 and as phrased by gesturpa. It's going to reach a point where it is unable go any further and there aren't any significant perturbations to its orbit.

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Take that IAU!

This was just a thought that popped in my head and I just had to ask it. I'm quite new to astronomy and the answer wasn't quite clear in my head.
Thanks guys

Until our descendants figures out a way to eject the Moon. Maybe to use as a weapon against the Martian Confederacy.

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The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

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The exact phrasing is actually that the planet must have cleared its orbit, which is specifically defined as being gravitationally dominant. By the definition of a trojan asteroid, Jupiter fits this definition. Earth is not exactly challenged for gravitational dominance of its orbit either, as nothing else anywhere near earth's orbital path is even in the same order of magnitude aside from the moon, which is orbiting Earth.

As for pluto and neptune, the resonance is why Neptune is considered dominant - it is in a stable, well established pattern in which Neptune is by far the gravitational superior.

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You're adorable when you're being an apologist.

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A patriot must be ready to defend his country against his government
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If only it was as easy to soothe my hunger by rubbing my belly.
- Diogenes of Sinope

You mean the moon is still around?

I thought we got rid of it on 13 September 1999

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Obviously, you didn't read (or believe) dodecahedron's post.

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But I was told that that thing in the sky was not the moon and that the Earth did not have a moon

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I hope it flings itself into some other object, provided it's not us.

I do so love fireworks!

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But it is the Moon's presence that keeps our axial tilt at the just so angle it is, otherwise life would be less comfortable, well so I am told

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This sloppy definition will almost certainly be changed a few million years before anything happens to the moon.

There actually have been suggestions by astronomers to label satellites of planets large enough to have achieved hydrostatic equilibrium as secondary planets (meaning they orbit planets instead of orbiting stars directly).

Sloppy?

Actually, in the solar system, the distinction is quite clear (and we don't have any others to study in sufficient detail). There are no discovered objects that blur the boundary at all. Here is a plot of the mass ratios of some objects in our solar system (object mass vs other stuff in its orbital zone not gravitationally bound to it). See if you can find the obvious cutoff.

There is actually far more ambiguity as to when an object has truly achieved hydrostatic equilibrium than there is in this.

Attached Thumbnails

 

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Shouldn't there be a citation with a graph like that?

OK. I created the graph myself, in microsoft excel. Now, to dig through my internet history for the source of the data...

OK, found it. The source is Steven Soter's paper "What is a Planet," submitted to the Astrophysical Journal (which is quite an interesting paper btw).

Here is a link to it

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The sloppy parts of the definition ("sloppy" is the word used by Alan Stern) are: a) the vague concept of "clearing its orbit," which if applied literally, could exclude all the planets in our solar system because none fully clears its orbital fields of nearby asteroids, and Neptune does not clear its orbit of Pluto; b) the definition of a "dwarf planet" as not being a planet at all.

The further an object is from its parent star, the less likely it is to clear its orbit. This means if we find a Mars-sized object in the Kuiper Belt, according to the IAU definition, that object is not a planet while the real Mars is. There is an obvious problem here in that the definition looks solely at where the object is rather than what it is.

Geophysically, Pluto and Eris are much more like planets than like asteroids. Yes, they are different from the other eight, but that simply means they fall under a different type or subcategory of planet. There is no ambiguity that these objects and Ceres have in fact achieved hydrostatic equilibrium.

Astronomical definitions of other objects, such as stars and galaxies, cover a very broad range including many subcategories. Stars are not demoted because they are part of binary systems and therefore don't "clear their orbits." Tiny dwarf galaxies orbiting with the Milky Way are still considered galaxies even though the Milky Way could be said to control their orbits. Why should the definition of planet be so narrowly limited in a way that other astronomical definitions are not?