Sunday, June 7, 2009

I don't think Pluto should be classified as a planet. If it doesn't meet the criteria then it's not a dubbed 'Planet'. If Price Charles was in a coma would you let him be King? No, he doesn't have the qualfications to rule. Science trumps tradition.

1 comment:

  1. Whose criteria? If astronomers cannot agree on what criteria to use, that means there is debate in the field. There are two camps: dynamicists, who study the way objects influence one another, and planetary geologists, who study the composition of those individual objects. The IAU definition was adopted by a tiny minority of astronomers dominated by dynamicists, and the issue is being debated separately by the American Geophysical Union and the European Geophysical Union. Many planetary scientists are not IAU members and had no say in this. So I would not give the IAU definition the status of "fact" but rather of one interpretation of fact within an ongoing debate.

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