wtf is it? A dwarf? Eight, eight? Well the textbook industry will be happy. Or a whole lotta people are going to get a really boring job of whiting out a ton of textbooks.
I put in a link to the National Geographic article.
*Sigh* and I thought I liked change....why does this bother me? I am soooo weird!
Excerpt:"Whoa! Pluto's dead," said astronomer Mike Brown, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as he watched a Webcast of the vote. "There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system."
What Is a Planet Today?
According to the new definition, a full-fledged planet is an object that orbits the sun and is large enough to have become round due to the force of its own gravity. In addition, a planet has to dominate the neighborhood around its orbit.
Pluto has been demoted because it does not dominate its neighborhood. Charon, its large "moon," is only about half the size of Pluto, while all the true planets are far larger than their moons.
2 comments:
We may have only eight planets now, but we have four dwarfs.....not quite as many as Snow White, but it's a start.
I saw the state of some of the people that were discussing what to do with Pluto, and if I was Pluto, I'd be glad to be out of it!
Look on the bright side - the number of planets was going to change anyway with the number of discovered dwarfs, at least this draws a line in the sand and keeps the number at 8, rather than it be 10 now, 13 in 3 years. Now that would please the book publishers.
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