They prefer to be called "little planets." Honestly, I've long been in favor of dumping Pluto for it's obvious idiosyncrasies, but I really liked the definition that they had tentatively come up with last week. I was looking foward to getting 3 new planets, and now that we're down to 8, I find myself a little disappointed, even though it is what I wanted. Ah well. More fodder for the first few days of school.
They don't really have a definition to change. The proposed one from last week was written largely with an eye towards keeping Pluto in for purely sentimental reasons. Unfortunately there is no way to satisfy those who want to keep what we have. Either we keep Pluto, and add more planets, or we dump it.
I'm glad there are people with nothing better to do or get worked up about than what to call an item floating around in space. Not like what we call it will change what it will be.
Yeah. They're called scientists. A whole international union of them. Crazy thought, isn't it? The sad part is that such a small percentage of them voted on this. This isn't some decision made purely for kicks and giggles; as our scientific methods become more precise and allow us to find smaller bodies in far away solar systems (as opposed to the massive bodies that were first discovered), it's only practical to have a firm definition of what a "planet" is and isn't.
dude if you think thats lame, did you know that even something fundamental like quantum physics and general relativity is still in dispute til today? theres a lot of stuff that you may think is etched in stone but the scientific community keeps revisiting at least every quarter century.
