Did anyone try the "It isn't a planet it's Mickey's dog" joke already? If not here it is. =p

I completely agree with you, Pharoah. We should just call them all flying spheres and go find some more, or at least explore the ones we know right now.
Sure it's not as nice as before finding new space flying spheres... Now they find them based only on calculations... bah.

And Green Tea, school books aren't or weren't 'wrong'. You can just say they just used some old nomenclature, that's all. Calling it X or Y won't change any of it's properties. So your project is now as good as it was before all this superfluous discussion.

i bet, In 9 years, when NASA's New Horizons spacecraft reaches pluto, and finds a giant snow man, it will be redesignated a planet !


but seriously, I wonder how much time, money and effort was wasted on this.

Even in school exams, for the next decade or so, exam markers will be forced to accept pluto as a correct answer to "name a plannet" just to be fair to kids who have been taught otherwise in primary school.

wether Pluto is a plannet, or random rock is an argument better suited to drunken scientists, on a night out in the pub.

Its about time! I was getting really annoyed by all these claims for a tenth planet by people who really did not know the score. Many astronomers had already stopped thinking about Pluto as a planet for quite a while, realizing that it was just one of a whole belt of similar objects. It is just a formal definition that was lacking to make a definitive ruling on many different objects. Ruling the other way was unlikely for it would likely lead to an endlessly increasing list of planets as well as reversing an earlier decision to demote Ceres from the status of planet.


Ahhh.. So that's how they rule out Ceres as well, since the presence of the belt of asteroids of which it is a part disqualifies Ceres for the same reason, although most of the mass of the asteroid belt is in this one body.

The definition of dwarf planet does not have this qualification meaning that Pluto and Ceres share the classification as dwarf planets. Although I suppose Pluto and Charon will now be classified as a double dwarf planet.

I am in favor of making the first criterion, "has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape", a requirement for something to be a moon, which would disqualify the two so called moons of Mars, and reduce the numbers of moons for the large planets to more reasonable numbers.

Not to nitpick - but you've got a repeated typo in two of your messages - xboxrulz: CORRECT = dwarf INCORRECT=drawf.

There's an old dwarf joke about the seven dwarfs all having a bath. They were feeling happy. But happy got out. So they were all feeling grumpy.

A week after we are left with 8 planets. Pluto is no more called as a planet.

I have all my sympathies with pluto.

Are we still looking on how to define the planets. Since ages we have been teaching that there exists 9 planets. - A discovery is understandable but removing a planet from the list is not very understandable.

Also have a look here, a very important side effect : http://www.astahost.com/impact-astrology-p...net-t13137.html

I guess this is the best solution. It was either 8 or 12 planets - and to be honest, Pluto never was a planet. It's only the scientists' fault it wasn't handled earlier. For the last 15 years we new it were smaller, but number 9 wasn't to be changed.

Sure, I am sorry this is changed after so many years, but anything for science

I don't have a problem with 9 planets. They could say there were 36 of them if they wanted (as long as I didn't have to memorize all 36), but I DO have a problem with them not coming to a final conclusion. 4 years ago in science we learned that there were 5 kingdoms of life, then they decided to change that to 3 domains, and 4 kingdoms in the Eukeria one. Now my brother says that they've done away with the domains and they just have 7 kingdoms! How is anyone supposed to learn anything when they're just trying to keep track of all this classification terminology?

pain and suffering.. i wanted to be a a doctor once or a bilogist with skills on taxonomy.. i have memories man.. all the kingdoms, phylums and others together with the scientific names.. only to find out that they have replace a lot of scientific names and reorganize the orders and kingdoms...

some of the changes reasons was pure lame.. IMO.. lame.. now about the planets.. i dont care how many then name and how many planets they will add.. just make sure that it wont give conflicts on other studies.. imagine teaching a child that pluto is not a planet and that same child read and was told that it was indeed a planet..

imagine arguing something like this with some folks that do not have direct access to internet and cable media..

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I would say this fact is not a real problem.
Some tens of years ago, Pluto was discovered and stated being a planet.
Now, theres is a slight rectification. Pluto is not simply a planet, it's part of a group of several astronomic objects gravitating around the Sun. More complicated, but very few different from being a planet.
Remember the asteroïd group between Mars and Jupiter. They behave as small planets, but are considered being a whole set insteat of being independant objects. This is simply the case now with Pluto.
And, be happy. The children will have to learn the name of only eight planets, instead of twelve if all the new objects were considered as Pluto-like planetoïds.