Kicked out of the club. Welcome to the club.
Of the two recent definitions of (major) planet, I find I don't really mind either one. The first one, which would have made Pluto and Charon a double planet system, returned planet status to Ceres, and made planets of a few objects not yet formally named was reasonable. That it would make planets of a good many things bothered some, but it was ( Read more... )
As dakhun points out, the new definition is so vague and poorly worded that we could insist that Neptune is a "dwarf planet" as well. That's patently absurd, but he appears to be right. Since Neptune has failed to capture Pluto as a moon, it hasn't cleared its orbit. Never mind that the mass of Neptune is huge compared to that of the inner planets, because mass isn't even a factor in this new set of requirements.
The fact that the whole question of what a "planet" really is should have absorbed so much energy and created so much furor is proof that it's a political issue rather than a scientific one. Technically, we could just as well say that only planetary bodies that are visible to the naked eye count as planets, since that was the original Greek sense of the word. That would kick out Pluto, Neptune, probably Uranus, and certainly the rest of the controversial orbiters, such as Xena and Charon and Ceres. Now we have to figure out how to keep from calling comets planets, eh?
I really think that the basis of the fuss was over who should be credited with discovering a planet. And if certain people can be kept from receiving that acclaim by redefining the word planet, then that's the way it would be done. That's political, and unfortunately typical of this sort of thing.
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