Experts meet to decide Pluto fate, Finally we'll know what a 'planet' is... Options

[MizarKey]

One of many articles regarding the upcoming conference...

Experts meet to decide Pluto fate

[volcanopele]

David brought up a good point that this is more procedural for the IAU than really anything else. Personally, I still feel that this argument over what is and what is not a planet is perhaps one of the most moronic arguments I have ever heard of. As others have mentioned, "planet" has no real scientific use.

I say let it be any natural object primarily (in other words not another planet, like Titan) orbiting a star. Yes, we have billions of planets. Do you have to memorize them all? Of course not. Since the voyagers flew past the giant planets, we have found moons that are just as interesting scientifically, if not more so. Can anyone here argue that Mercury is more scientifically important than Titan, Enceladus, Io, or Europa? But yet, because Mercury is given the gilded status of "planet" far more people are aware of Mercury and maybe a few of its properties, than they are aware of Titan or Io or any of the other interesting moons in our solar system.

And why are people having such a problem with Pluto being a planet or "Xena"? People can't contemplate a solar system with *shock* 10 planets? Did people in 1783 try to come up with definitions for planet to exclude Uranus? I mean 6 is a perfect number, there can't be more planets than the 6 known ones, obviously. So anything found outside the orbit of Saturn is a Trans-Saturnian object and not a planet, regardless of size. No, they accepted uranus as a planet, and its discovery spured on the hunt for another. Then Neptune's discovery spured the hunt for yet another.

If people want a size limiting definition, fine, go with the one rogelio suggested. Pluto is the lower limit for a planet. Anything found that is larger than it, is a planet. If there are 20 more planets, so be it. If there are thousands of potential planets, so be it. I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.