Monday, August 14, 2006

Quo Vadis, Pluto?

Members of the International Astronomical Union are gathering in Prague to discuss the fate of Pluto - whether to still consider the body as a planet or to demote it into a lesser status: asteroid, Kuiper Belt object, planetissimal. More importantly the outcome of IAU's discussio would be to define, for once and for all, what really a planet is. The group will also discuss the classification of newly discovered bodies like Xena and Segna. (And we think taxonomists had it easy classifying the platypus...)

My stance for the manner is that the IAU can set Pluto as the mininum size for a planet. This way Pluto's historical significance can still be preserved and saving us the trouble of updating all the books about the Solar System.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Doing that would also qualify Xena to be a planet, so the books will have to be changed just the same.