As I had hoped, the IAU took the proposal vote seriously to resolve Pluto's squatter status among the planets in our Solar System. As I had wished earlier (and even quoted), Pluto is no longer a planet and has been demoted to "dwarf planet." Of course, the IAU has to muck things up a little: a dwarf planet is defined as any non-planetary body that "has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite." This is vague, and already Pluto defenders are drawing up a new proposal to keep Pluto as a planet. That's why I still like my mass-ratio idea of less than 0.25. If the body has another body smaller than a quarter of its mass, it is designated as the dominant body and the smaller bodies are the satellites. It's arbitrary, but so is the set of conditions in the proposal.
One complaint against the proposal has no weight: that only five percent of IAU members voted on the proposal. I wish that even fewer had, that only the planetary scientists were eligible for the vote. I worked for a cosmologist, and my knowledge of the solar system extends only to the undergraduate level classes I took as requirements for my degree. The extent of our knowledge of the planets was whether one was going to get in the way of our measurements. Cosmologists shouldn't be voting on stuff they've never written a paper on.
Just as long as Pluto is not considered a planet like the other eight, and that future small rocks or iceballs have no chance of being called a "planet," that's good enough for me.
Hey!
ReplyDeleteI resemble that remark!