Large Planet discovered outside Pluto

The debate is ended somehow - the IAU voted for a definition according to which Pluto is not a planet no more but a dwarf planet.

The definition consists of the effects of the physical property gravity. Only round bodies that can or could incorporate or eject material surrounding it are called planets while round bodies that can or could NOT do that are dwarf planets. All bodies else are neither planets nor dwarf planets.

This si reported by the article "BREAKING NEWS: Pluto Demoted, No Longer a Planet" ( www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060824_p ... ition.html ).



Dipl.-Volkswirt (bdvb) Augustin (Political Economist)

"I'm embarassed for astornomy," said Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto and a scientist at the Southwest Research Institute. "Less than 5 percent of the world's astronomers voted."

"This definition stinks, for technical reasons," Stern told SPACE.com. He expects the astronomy community to overturn the decision. Other astronomers criticized the definition as ambiguous.

Stern, in charge of the robotic probe on its way to Pluto, said the language of the resolution is flawed. It requires that a planet "has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." But Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Neptune all have asteroids as neighbors.

"It's patently clear that Earth's zone is not cleared," Stern told SPACE.com. "Jupiter has 50,000 trojan asteroids," which orbit in lockstep with the planet.

Stern called it "absurd" that only 424 astronomers were allowed to vote, out of some 10,000 professional astronomers around the globe.

"It won't stand," he said. "It's a farce."

Stern said astronomers are already circulating a petition that would try to overturn the IAU decision.

Owen Gingerich, historian and astronomer emeritus at Harvard who led the committee that proposed the initial definition, called the new definition "confusing and unfortunate" and said he was "not at all pleased" with the language about clearing the neighborhood.

Gingerich also did not like the term "dwarf" planet.

"I thought that it made a curious linguistic contradiction," Gingerich said in a telephone interview from Boston (where he could not vote). "A dwarf planet is not a planet. I thought that was very awkward."

Gingerich added: "In the future one would hope the IAU could do electronic balloting."

That sounds OK except for the possibility of demoting Mercury. Pluto was not discovered until 1930 and we should have known better than to call it a planet then, but Mercury was considered a planet before the Earth was! Any definition that demotes Mercury is out, IMO.

The whole debate is silly, an object is what it is, regardless of how we categorize it. Pluto is a unique object with unique properties. It doesn't matter whether you call it a planet, dwarf planet, KBO or asteroid. If you need to talk about it, you talk about its particular properties, NOT those typical of its 'kind'. We are talking about an object over 2000 km wide, with its own geography and (possibly) weather, not a pebble picked up on a beach.

I'd love a simple definition that kept Pluto as a planet. Of course, Pluto-Charon could be a binary planet, but where would you draw the line after that?

And I might point out that poor media relations aren't always the scientists' fault. Take your NEO example........

<snip>

You see the point. The media itself can be perfectly impossible to deal with at times, especially when it thinks it's dealing with scientists. Reporters generally consider scientists to be too stupid to understand the importance of a good story, so they just steamroll right over them.