[X] My Assistant

[volcanopele]

With the IAU vote coming up tomorrow, and after more than 17 pages of discussion on this topic, I thought it might be fun to see what the vote would be here. I've setup three questions here to see where people lie on this.

The first question is to see what people's favorite definition is. the original definition is the one proposed by the IAU's Planet Definition committee. see http://www.iau2006.org/mirror/www.iau.org/...resolution.html for the text if you haven't already read it. This would also include the changes from August 22, which removes the term "pluton" from the definition, and clarifies the barycenter issue by stating that the system's barycenter must be outside either object for the majority of the orbital period. the alternative definition, whose text can be seen at http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0608...w_proposal.html, was proposed by Julio A. Fernandez. This would demote Pluto to a "dwarf planet", a body that has relaxed to a eqilibrium shape but has not cleared out its orbit of "competing" objects. The others are fairly self-explanatory. The alternative reading of the Fernandez et al. definition would allow the largest satellites to be planets, adding 16 new planets (though 3 others could be added, like Iapetus, Mimas, and Miranda). The demote Earth one is more of a joke defintion, but highlights the fact that Jupiter and Earth really shouldn't be classified as the same type of object.

The other two questions are more up or down questions. Basically, if you were allowed to vote for the two proposed resolutions, how would you vote? Yea or nea?

Since this is a rather time sensitive question, I am leaving this topic open until Saturday at 11:59pm MST.