It’s official, Pluto is no longer a planet:
Forget what you learned in third grade. Pluto is no longer one of the nine planets of the solar system.
The International Astronomical Union in Prague ruled today that the much-maligned Pluto no longer qualifies as a planet under historic new guidelines, thereby stripping Pluto of the planetary status it has held since it was discovered in 1930, news services reported.
The prestigious international group in the Czech Republic today spelled out the basic tests a celestial body needs to pass before it can be deemed a planet: “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.”
It’s the last part of the definition that doomed Pluto. Its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s.
Pluto will now be reclassified in a new category of dwarf planets, similar to what astronomers have long called minor planets. Membership in the sun’s solar system will be restricted to the eight “classical” planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The definition also creates a third-class of lesser objects that orbit the sun — “small solar system bodies,” objects such as asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.
I expect a civil rights lawsuit to be filed soon.
August 25th, 2006 at 12:58 am
And we’ll all be dead this time next year in Plutonic time.