Meanwhile, in Space...

After long and contentious debate, the International Astronomical Union decided today that Pluto is not a planet. The first-ever official definition of a planet is ''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.'' Since Pluto's orbit crosses Neptune's, and since there are tens of thousands of similar objects in the Kuiper Belt, Puto is out of the club. The consolation prize is that Pluto, Charon, Ceres and bodies like the unoffically named Xena will now be called "dwarf planets."

Predictably, there are a lot of displeased people, such as the team behind the New Horizons probe, which launched toward a planet and will arive at a dwarf planet. Others, like space writer Robert Roy Britt are pleased with the compromise.

 Posted by El Destructo at 11:12 to Space Itself | TrackBack