What is the Plutonian equivalent of geocentric? [closed]
A satellite going around the earth is in geocentric orbit.
The Earth is in a heliocentric orbit about the sun.
Something going around Mars is areocentric.
What about the moons of Pluto? Pluto-centric?
References used for research:
- Wikipedia’s List of Orbits page
- Johns Hopkins Propulsion Laboratory’s New Horizons website
Hadeocentric
As Earth to Gaea gives geocentric and Jupiter as Jove gives jovicentric, so too does Pluto to Hades give hadeocentric.
Hades was the Greek god of the underworld, the Roman Pluto.
The word hadeocentric is based on the pattern of choosing Greek prefixes for words like heliocentric, geocentric, areocentric — which, for whatever reason, have won out over *suncentric, *earthcentric, *marscentric.
A Plutarch’s Lives
The problem with using pluto- as a combining form here is that “plutocentric” already means something, and it means something else altogether different from any astronomical sense: it instead carries economic or political overtones.
Roping the existing plutocentric1 into an alternate orbital sense thus risks being misunderstood as meaning something related to plutocracy, plutocrats, plutarchy — that is, to a money-centered form government or those who support it.
Whereas with hadeocentric, no such possible confusion can arise.
Footnotes
Citations for plutocentric used in the money-loving sense include:
-
But Bombay, with its plutocentric values, its pavement sleepers, its brutal mafia, did something to people, something violent and un-Indian.
—The revised Kama sutra: a novel of colonialism and desire, with arbitrary footnotes and a whimsical glossay, Richard Crasta. -
It is only through a plutocentric and consumerist culture that we have come to equate wealth with money, though no doubt resources can play a role in well-being.
—Cultivating Reality: How the Soil Might Save Us, Ragan Sutterfield. -
Once the plutocentric constraints are lifted, however, it is plausible to assume that the satisfaction of curiosity becomes a goal from time to time. In other parts of the Republic, Plato is happy to allow characters who rank well below the philosopher to pursue some form of intellectual interest.
—Plato’s Critique of the Democratic Character, Dominic Scott. -
Modern civilization is governed by a hybristic plutocentric culture, addicted to and trafficking in wealth at such a monstrous scale that its whole human and ideological Flatland of modern order tolerates no subversive or heretic contrarian formulations of belief or valuation.
—The Comics Journal, Issues 262-264, 2004.