You forgot to blame this on the nativists.

Nativism is Darwinist, not astronomic.

Actually, the astrologers should welcome this, as it allows them off the hook for all their bad horoscopes for the past 70 years. Those astronomers misled them into including Pluto and overstaing its influence and character. Just wait for the cottage industry in "properly recast" horoscopes which show that they'd have gotten it right if the astonomers hadn't been such dupes.

They can remove Pluto from the list of planets when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

JP

Less than two weeks ago there was an article that stated that with new definitions of what a planet is, we would have up to 12...which is it?

Whichever you want it to be.

It was silly to include Pluto in the first place. I read recently that there were over 50 potential planets in the solar system if they kept to the Pluto definition, including Charon. The scientists can define things however they like but Joe Sixpack isn't going to consider a moon to be a planet.

It has been kind of funny watching astronomers go berserk over something that has nothing to do with science in the sense of discovering anything. This is pure classification.

This discussion is embarassingly stuoid. Changing a thing's name does not change what it is. That would be just too gay.

Well, homocentric at any rate.

The proposed rule that disqualifies Pluto, viz., that the body be large enough to have cleared their neighborhood of other objects, which Pluto fails because its orbit goes inside Neptune and it therefore hasn't cleared Neptune from its vicinity, would equally disqualify Neptune. However, this rule would also disqualify at the least Mars, Jupiter, and Neptune because of their trojan objects (planetoidal objects at the L4 and L5 Lagrange points in the same orbit).

There are asteroids that cross the orbits of all eight planets. (Check out the Apollo and Amor class definitions). The point is that there's no belt like the one between Mars and Jupiter or the one beyond Neptune. That Pluto is simply the object with the combination of being one of the largest and one of the innermost, which made it so easy to detect it took half a century to find the next member of the class. (The same sort of thing happened with the asteroids, whose numbers were stuck at 4 for decades).

Fixing a mistake made decades ago can be hard. Stare decisis isn't science, especially when sentimentality gets in the way.

But I'm surprised no one has objected to "dwarf planet". Shouldn't that be "little people planet" or "hobbit planet"?