Originally published August 7 2005
Astronomers to decide what makes a planet
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
The discovery of a new addition to our solar system has prompted astronomers to fast-track plans to decide what is and is not a planet.
The claim Friday that a 10th planet has been discovered in our solar system has set off a fresh round of debate and international talks aimed at defining the most vexing term in astronomy: the word planet.
"Scientists have for the most part not yet realized that the term planet no longer belongs to them," says Caltech's Mike Brown, who led the discovery of the new larger-than-Pluto object.
Brown's new view comes after contemplating six years of mostly fruitless scientific arguments that began when the public became outraged over a rumor that scientists planned to demote Pluto, a rumor rooted in the fact that some astronomers had already stopped calling Pluto a planet by the late 1990s.
"I finally realized the mistake we astronomers had been making all along," Brown told SPACE.com yesterday.
In recent years, several other round worlds at least half as big as Pluto have been found on similar offbeat paths, including two announced last week in addition to 2003 UB313, whose orbit is inclined a whopping 45 degrees.
Most astronomers view all of them, Pluto included, as members of the Kuiper Belt (other terms are used, too, to describe the increasingly complex outer solar system).
Hertz, chief scientist in the agency's Science Mission Directorate, acknowledged the task falls to the International Astronomical Union (IAU).
An IAU Working Group specifically set up to develop a recommendation has been stalled for the past six months.
But most of the dozen members in the group were "exchanging a lot of email this weekend," said Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, who is on the committee.
In Brown's mind -- and he admits to changing it recently -- Pluto is too enshrined in our culture, from place mats to postage stamps, to strip it of planethood.
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