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March 12, 2009
Pluto Is A Planet Again
http://news.nationalgeographic.co.uk/news/2009/03/090311-pluto-planet-illinois.html
The Illinois resolution comes more than two years after the International Astronomical Union (IAU) "demoted" Pluto, reclassifying it as a dwarf planet and reducing the solar system's official planetary count to eight.
The organization's main role is to name objects and features in space. It was the struggle over who got to name Eris--the committee in charge of asteroids or the one that names planets--that led to reassessment of Pluto's status.
In August 2006 the IAU announced that from then on a body can only be called a planet if it orbits the sun, is large enough to have become round due to the force of its own gravity, and has swept its orbital neighborhood clean of large objects.
Pluto was demoted because it violates the last criterion: Charon, one of its moons, is about half the size of Pluto.
According to Stern, the ruling was unrepresentative because only a handful of IAU members were present to vote. What's more, he said, the IAU's scientific purview is mostly astrophysics, not planetary science.
"It's as if a bunch of thoracic [chest cavity] surgeons declared brain cancer not a cancer--it's not their field of expertise," he said.
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Posted by Rob Kiser on March 12, 2009 at 9:50 AM
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