Noooooooo If Pluto is a planet the there are literally thousands of planets in the solar system and we'd be adding new ones every week.. That would just be very silly indeed
Pluto is not a planet. To classify it as one would require that we expand the universe of planets to several dozen. I do advocate calling dwarf planets Plutons or something along those lines that gives Pluto some recognition. But if Pluto is a planet, so is Ceres, Vespa, Charon, Eris, etc., IMO.
It's a double-planet system. Wait, actually, didn't they find a third body in the dance? Technically, the Earth and Moon is a double-planet system too, orbiting about a common point (whihc in our case is somewhere inside the Earth).
Which is what should make it a moon if the term 'moon' is properly reclassified (which it might be soon) Pluto has 3 moons
I thought the people at NASA had already decided that they would make Pluto a planet again. Have I missed something?
Its not up to NASA. They build and control vehicles, they dont decide astronomical norms. Its basically up to the international astronomical union, although many people where unhappy at their original reclassification
The whole classification thing stinks. For starters it could be argued Earth fails the planetary classification for the same reason Pluto does - asteroids share Earths orbit, so Earth hasn't cleared it's orbital path... Add to this, tidal forces will eventually promote the moon to a planet, and any planet knocked out of orbit will be reclassified as 'something else' and you have a classification system that could be called, charitably, 'shit' Doesn't help that only around 40% of the IAU even voted on the proposal. Given how we're looking at other systems, I suspect the current method of classifying planets will meet the bin before too long.
Yeah! "Eight planets" is boring. Give all of those fuckers a name and let the school kids loose on learning each of them.
