Thursday, August 24, 2006
"I'm sorry, we no longer have a planet called 'Pluto'..."
This week, the International Astronomical Union has stripped Pluto of it status as a planet, by redefining planet as "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."
What?! Who are these guys in the IAU? I didn't vote for them, I know that. I'm sure the Plutonians aren't going to take this lightly either - pretty soon I'm sure we'll see them dressed up like Native Martians at the spacedock while throwing our shipments of Earth tea out the airlock.
A couple of weeks ago, they'd even proposed adding three more planets to the Solar System:
But instead of adding Ceres, Charon, and UB313 (aka Xena), they threw them out along with Pluto, classifying the whole lot of them as "dwarf planets", leaving our Solar System with only eight planets:
Whatever.
Labels: science/tech
