It seems a collective of 2500 astronomes decided to give Pluto a different definition instead of “Planet”
Nice to know i’ve been taught over all those years the nine planets of our system while there are now only eight (well nine with the latest discovery perhaps) http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astr…wers/pluto.html
Erased or not, it has been floating around in the system and still hasn’t molten yet.
The old picture… at least the game “Find Pluto” would still go here… http://www.nineplanets.org/gif/NinePlanets.jpg
Pluto is no more a planet; it has been degreded to the new class of “dwarf (or plutonian) planets”, to which now adhere the former asteroid Ceres, and the former Pluto satellite Caron, the recently discovered Xena (UB303).
So, in a sense, we have now three more planets than before.
The main reason for this change is that is more likely that in a short future a lot of objects similar to Ceres or Caron will be found; they have the properties required to be classified as a planet, but they are propbably too numerous to crowd the planet list.
Personally, I agree with this new definition, though is of course difficult to accept in a “hearty” way.
Remember that dog the russians sent out on to cruise around the planet? Well, it never arrived back on Earth, and somehow someone mixed up the facts; the dog, which wasn’t named Pluto, but Pluto is so to speak sononymous with the word dog (thanks to Disney), continued to circle our planet. Now finally someone has discovered that the dead dog isn’t a planet afterall!
PS: There also are rumours that Disney has paid off certain scientists and astronomers for getting rid of the “planet” Pluto, because of the name it has been given. Disney are convinced that they named their beloved cartoon dog FIRST, before the astronomers named the circling dog, sorry, the “planet” Pluto.
Hey, with all the money Disney has, that wouldn’t be a problem would it?
Yeah, all those planets. One more thing the government shouldn’t have told us about.
Don’t they see the problem with naming, classifying and collecting data on them in the first place? If you do one, you’ve got to do them all. At the end of the decade we’ll have tens of thousands of overworked astronomers who eat up resources like they were celery stalks, and civilization will fall flat on it’s face. The aliens are laughing…
Well, I think Pluto is much better off with the “young and wild” gang in the solar system, and having a friend called “2003 UB 313” simply rocks. I’d wish I’d have a friend with such a cool name.
