N deG T is wrong in thinking that Europe doesn't care. I don't think I've been to an astronomy society that hasn't had that debate.

Doug

I didn't get to see the end of it because in the 6-hour window in which my plumber could have showed up, he showed up during the debate, of course.

Any commentary on the value of this exercise? I'd like to hear more Europeans and Australians and etc. chime in on Neil's claim that only Americans care about this.

--Emily

Interesting debate. I think the best point made, and Tyson made it, was that educators need to move away (as quickly as possible) from teaching the solar system by counting planets, by memorizing their names. That is not science. Perhaps if people were educated more on the richness of the solar system, knew more about the moons of the outer solar system, and about the properties of each of the types of objects, I don't think the planet debate would be as highly charged.

And maybe the reason others may not be as interested is because planetary science is taught differently (perhaps better) in other countries. Here planets are taught as the be all and end all of planetary science, you might even learn a bit about their properties, but hardly anything is discussed about other objects, like moons. That's why something being called a planet seems so important here.

All..

I am not going to get into a discussion of details (still in shock after walking away unscathed from a car crash yesterday that totaled my just paid off car).

But I think the debate was lively and just wish more people could see science panel discussions like this to see how science works. Loved watching it no matter what the position of the Dr. Sykes and Dr. Tyson.

I agree the simplest definition of as planet is that the object is massive enough to undergo hydrostatic equilbrium.

I agree that under that simple definition can be many sub categories.... to reflect the richness of these bodies in the
universe we share.

Really loved the discussion.

Craig

Well, my views on this are well known and I'm not going to repeat them here. But I will comment on what's been said.

I respect NDgT a lot, as an Educator, broadcaster, writer and scientist, but IMO that was a rather silly and slightly arrogant thing to say and was very disappointing to hear. At the time of the IAU Conference it was BIG news, all over the TV and radio; my local BBC radio station and ITV TV station interviewed me on air about it. I was asked by countless people about what was going on. It was crazy. Now that has died down, but this is a subject that still generates a lot of interest, debate and passion over on this side of the pond. We have two astronomy monthly magazines here in the UK, and both have ran features on the debate and have featured letters and emails from readers. As Doug said, every astronomy society over here will have discussed the subject, and views are entrenched on both sides.

So, to suggest that this is only of interest to Americans is ridiculous, and disappointingly elitist.

Stunning news, I know, but over here we have electricity and running water now. Oh, and a space agency, too. We have thousands of astronomical societies, and bookstores full of books on astronomy and space. UMSF has many European members, as does TPS, I'm sure. To suggest that none of them care about this is just wrong.

One take home message I got (and I think Tyson made this point) was that it was OK to ignore the IAU ruling.

I'm cool with this, we usually ignore most of the IUPAC [International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry] nomenclature rules during our everyday work. As long as we all know what we're talking about, it's cool.
["A picture is worth a thousand words, ten thousand if it's IUPAC"].

For the future, I'll just make a point of clearly defining the individual items if I ever use a blanket term that could be ambiguous.

-Mike

My sense is that in Britain that people who only have a passing interest in astronomy would be amused or bemused, but we don't have the kind of reaction from the public that Tyson described about his planetarium.

I found the debate more enlightening than I expected so a definite plus there. The contrasting aesthetics came across very well, I thought: Tyson's description of how his planetarium is organised, and Sykes's vision of Ceres.

When Mark Sykes pointed out that most Planetary Scientists aren't in the IAU, it convinced me they should just formalize their own definition and use it in their publications. From what Sykes said (and what we've heard from Alan Stern here), Planetary Scientists seem to be pretty close to a consensus on what sort of definition would meet their needs. Perhaps Allan Stern and Mark Sykes might write up something.

--Greg

I said a rude word when he said that. Quite loudly. Complete and utter...bu.....umm....nonsense. Every astronomy society I've been to up and down the country has had this discussion. London to Liverpool, I've had it with friends, family. Not as passionately as N de GT (who is?) - but still, it happens.

As a parent who has recently stocked up on a very large number of planet-related books for my son, I have a large number of gripes about their contents. A lot of these take the form of "fallout" from something innocuous higher up the research food chain. For example, my son wants to know why pictures of Venus's hillsides have big black stripes across them. It's where Magellan lacked data. There's nothing inherently wrong with data releases that handle the blanks that way, but when they appear unexplained in a kids' book, they distract quite a bit from the topic. False color images are another issue. When a kid's seen green stripes on Saturn in one picture, it's hard to explain infra-red radiation. It really puts the cart before the horse -- it's an explanation that's perfectly fine for some future day, but it is hell to make, unwittingly, the intro.

The almost total deemphasis of non-planets is another. I couldn't find a kid's book on Io, Europa, or Titan; definitely not in the Spanish language, which I'm using to read to my son. The books imply that it's more important to know how many satellites Uranus has (quick quiz -- anyone on here know without looking?) than what any of them are like. Or, lord forbid, that any of them might actually be as interesting as the planet itself.

This goes to the broader issue of how outreach could be improved. In my opinion, quite a bit. I think the screensaver images I created of the major solar system bodies (many thanks to people in this forum) are so dramatically superior, as a set, to any I've seen illustrate any book. I wonder how many kids have looked at ancient photos of Mercury and asked their parents why it has a checkerboard pattern and gotten a blank or spurious reply. In place of actual learning that could be happening.

I reckon Pluto is beheld by kids more than by scientists, and while it would make no sense to foist a kiddie definition upon the scientists, neither is it good education to foist a tortured dynamical definition on them. Shoot, we're talking about kids who won't learn what an ellipse is for another six years.

Just to chime in...

We here in Australia have the same reaction to that comment about 'only Americans care about this'.
The discussions I have seen here in magazines, in astronomy clubs and from the ten thousand plus students that I talk with every year, there is considerable interest in the outcome of the ongoing debate about Pluto (and other worlds) status.

I find kids feeling 'sad' for Pluto, teachers confused 'is it a planet, dwarf, plutoid and next week what?', and the public wondering if Pluto just disappeared (or on several occasions, 'blown up!').

On the weekend, we are holding our Open House at the Canberra DSN and one of the talks I will give is on this very subject.
It will be a packed room and I'll guarantee that every person WILL 'care about this'!

Welcome to my world! You have no idea how many discussions/heated discussions/arguments I've had with various publishers and editors over the content of my books. It's a constant battle to persuade them to use images that are realistic and "true" over ones that "look nice" or "dramatic" but give a very false impression of what's Out There. I actually had a fight over that Magellen image you mention; after getting the editor to understand that no, there weren't ACTUALLY black stripes on Venus, I then had to try and persuade him that unless we could explain the true "false colour/radar image" nature of the pic then the readers would be given a very false impression. I won that one. But I have lost many arguments, including ones re the use of those garish classic "false colour" Voyager images of Saturn and Uranus, and hideously over-coloured images of Mars....



Thankfully the editor I'm working with now is very open to input and wants to make the book as up to date as possible, so agreed to postpone work on the Saturn spread until after the Enceladus encounter, and we're leaving a blank box ready to update the Pluto page at the last possible moment.

If anybody wants to continue discussing this topic after it has been banned here, I suggest the Yahoo Group Major or Minor : What Makes It a Planet?

It has been two years since it was last active, but it's still available.

Bill

After they added Makemake the IAU site said there were 4 dwarf planets.

I thought maybe a new one had been added and hadn't been officially announced yet, perhaps the debaters were including Charon in their own list even though at least one of them mentioned that the IAU doesn't recognize it.