In the immortal words of Tony Bruno, it's an outrage.A moment of science, er ... silence, please. The planet Pluto is no more.
Thank you.
Long live the dwarf planet Pluto.
A few hundred of the world's astronomers, convening in Prague at the International Astronomical Union's meeting, voted to strip Pluto of the honor it has held since its discovery in 1930 by Claude Tombaugh. Pluto's status has been a bone of contention for the past few decades, as discoveries of other large objects orbiting the Sun, and refined measurements of its size, have led to a new understanding of the Solar System's incredible complexity.
Last week, there was a proposal that would have brought the Solar System's total to 12, by classifying the asteroid Ceres, Pluto's satellite Charon, and the distant 2003 UB313 (a.k.a. "Xena") as planets. But that was rejected, apparently after outraging a large contingent of astronomers. Other various nomenclatures and lineups were proposed, but today, the IAU decided to classify objects as: planets (the classic 8, since 1846 anyway), dwarf planets (Pluto, and likely Xena, Ceres, and many others as well), and Small Solar System Bodies (comets, asteroids, Anna Sharapova, etc.).
That's too bad. I'm gonna miss the little feller, although I understand some of the reasoning behind the new definition.
But, Pluto is still an important world. It's at the inner edge of a totally unknown part of the Solar System, and it's never been explored up close. I'm going to check out the findings of the New Horizons spacecraft when it passes by Pluto & Charon in July 2015. And by then, maybe today's decision will have been overturned.
2 comments:
This isn't a new idea, but I prefer the idea of calling them "planettes"...sort of like "dinettes".
Anyway, wasn't Ceres considered to be a planet until a few decades ago?
Yes, Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Juno, which were the first 4 asteroids discovered in the early 1800s, were all considered planets, and were assigned sings like the other planets had. But when it became clear that there were a lot of these "planets" between Mars & Jupiter, they weren't considered planets any more. Although, Ceres & Vesta are known to be almost completely round, not potato-shaped big chunks of iron, or gravel piles, like the other asteroids.
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