> Personally, I think they're right to define
>Pluto as not-a-planet. I far prefer this
>definition to the one being thrown around a week >ago, that would have had Pluto, Charon, Ceres and
>UB2003 (provisionally named "Xena") as all being
>planets. Not to mention the thousands of other
>balls of ice of Pluto's size in the outer reaches
>of the solar system.

I think demoting Pluto has been a long time coming, actually. And I think people will eventually change their usage, too. Sure, Sam's never gonna not call it a planet, but eventually kids will learn in school that Pluto is just one of a number of Kuiper Belt objects, and it's not even the largest. It's the same way with Ceres--when it was first discovered it was called a planet, until eventually scientists realized there were a whole SLEW of objects in that orbit. Now we just call it the asteroid belt, and Ceres is just one of the largest asteroids (perhaps the largest? I'm unsure) in that orbit.


> Where I think the new definition is completely,
>utterly, pointlessly stupid is in clause (1)(a),
>which specifies that to be a planet, a body must
>be "in orbit around the Sun" - that is to say,
>the 204 currently known objects in orbit around
>other stars that are commonly known as
>"extrasolar planets" are no longer classified as
>planets. Even though many of them are larger than
>Jupiter.

Yeah, not sure what the heck that was all about. What are people supposed to call those things now?

-- Dave