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IAU Proposes 3 New Planets
IZ Reloaded writes "Sources tell SPACE.com that the International Astronomical Union is preparing to include three new entries to the current list of planets in our solar system. From the article: The asteroid Ceres, which is round, would be recast as a dwarf planet in the new scheme. Pluto would remain a planet and its moon Charon would be reclassified as a planet. Both would be called "plutons," however, to distinguish them from the eight "classical" planets. A far-out Pluto-sized object known as 2003 UB313 would also be called a pluton."
We need a planetary definition so we can communicate efficiently. Why else do we need words. Try talking about your environment without classifications of natural objects:
I bought my direct ancestral animated entities an animated entity with four appendages used for walking, one appendage for knocking down lamps, a soft covering that is white with black spots, which speaks in guttural exclamations which are just nonsensical to animated entities like myself.
Instead of:
I bought my kids a dog
As our observations of our environment reveals new information. We must periodically change our definitions to attempt to make our abstractions best reflect reality.
But according to an article by Isaac Asimov (Just Mooning Around from Of Time and Space and Other Things), the Sun pulls the Moon twice as strongly as the Earth does, and the Moon's orbit, drawn to scale, is always concave toward the Sun, making a very convincing argument that the Earth and the Moon are a double planet system, even though their center of revolution is a thousand miles beneath the Earth's surface.
If Charon is to be classified as a minor planet, the Moon should be too.
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The "debate" is basically a media event, based on people who take their grade-school science classes too seriously, and think that for some reason that the Solar System must contain exactly nine "planets".
I think that one of the problems in this country (the US) is that we do not take grade school science seriously enough. We need those science classes to engage the kids and hopefully inspire some of them to a career in some scientific field.