Definition of Planet to be Announced in September

MasaMuneCyrus writes "After over seven years of debating, the International Astronomical Union announced that it expects to announce the official definition of a planet in September. After many-a-deadlock, they handed the task of deciding exactly what a planet is to a new committee, which includes historians and educators. 'They wanted a different perspective from that of planetary scientists,' said Edward Bowell, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who is also vice president of the IAU's Division III-Planetary Systems Sciences group. If all goes according to plan, the wording will be proposed in their 12-day General Assembly meeting in Prague."

Comments

Will they finally discount pluto?

[Shrithe]

I hope Pluto finally gets excluded from planet definition. It's too small (only twice the size as it's "moon", Charon, and a little less than a fifth as massive as Luna), it's out of the plane of the elliptic (a trait shared with objects like comets, but not any planets), and it's not even orbiting in a stable configuration with regard to Neptune (for part of it's orbit, Pluto is in fact eighth, and Neptune ninth).

Then there's the fact that it only really got counted as a planet in the first place because astronomers at the time of it's discovery were hung up on the idea of discovering a ninth planet. They thought they found a disturbance in Neptune's orbit, which they attributed to a ninth planet, but ended up being caused by the fact that they were working from bad data about Neptune's mass. Pluto's much too small to have any effect on Neptune's orbit.

This might finally put the final nail in the coffin of the idea of nine major planets in our solar system. We can only hope.