[GuidoHunter]

I was actually pretty surprised to hear this. First of all, we've known for a decent while that Pluto shouldn't be a planet simply because were it discovered today we would dub it a Kuyper Belt Object. But, I figured we'd never demote it just because we've gone and called it a planet for decades and changing it wouldn't really do much good, but it would be a pain in the ass to change everything.

THEN, I heard recently that there were deliberations to up our planet count to TWELVE. Some committee was going to actually set down a definition of what a planet is. The three criteria would be:

1. It's sufficiently big so that its shape is defined by its internal gravity and not by its material composition
2. It's not big enough to have nuclear fusion going on in its core (it's not a star)
3. It goes 'round a star and not a planet

This would jave added the biggest asteroid in the asteroid belt, Ceres; Pluto's "moon" Charon (in some weird occurrance, the center of rotation of Pluto and Charon is outside of Pluto's surface, so they both revolve around some invisible point, instead of Charon revolving around Pluto, as does our moon about us; and 2003 UB313, better known as Xena, with its moon Gabrielle.

But apparently that fell through, and they just cut Pluto out. =\

--Guido

http://andy.mikee385.com