More Mickey Mouse Planets

There's having a big astronomy pow-wow in Prague; they're debating the definition of a planet. The last few years have seen a number of discoveries of Plutoesque planets in the Kuiper Belt out in the edge of the Solar System; the question that is on the table is whether to demote Pluto to being a mere Kuiper Belt denizen or to promote the bigger Kuiperites (plutons is the official word for those Kuiperites, although that sounds more like the small particles that don't make it down on the first flush) to planet status.

The working draft has three new planets; Pluto's moon Charon, who the astronomers think is a fellow Kuiperite that came into Pluto's orbit, the large asteroid Ceres with an orbit between Mars and Jupiter, and a big Kuiperite nicknamed Xena by its discoverer; Xena's official designation is 2003 UB313.

One interesting factoid that came out in these pieces is that Ceres was considered a planet in the 1800s and got demoted in the 1900s.

Astronomy might go through the changes that geography did in the last quarter century. Folks who went to school in the 60s and 70s are having to learn a bunch of new countries that weren't around in the Cold War era, like all the components of Yugoslavia and the USSR; it's hard for a lot of folks to keep Slovakia and Slovenia straight, not to mention all the new "stans."  It will be equally hard for folks who studied their science in the 20th century to keep Xena and Sedna andQuaoar (the last two being other Kuiperite candidates for planethood) straight.

Comments

[William Sulik]

I'm hoping for "Persephone."