Looks like NASA wants to alter the definition of "planet" so Pluto will have it's status reversed:
From a USA Today article (http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/n...gain/98187922/)
The demotion of the planet is quite simply “bulls***,” Alan Stern, principal investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto told Business Insider in 2015.
And two years later, Stern and his colleagues are not backing down from that belief, Gizmodo reports. In a proposal sent to the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for approval, the team suggests that a new definition of a planet, that is more in line with “scientific classification and peoples’ intuition.”
“In the mind of the public, the word 'planet' carries a significance lacking in other words used to describe planetary bodies,” the proposal states. “In the decade following the supposed 'demotion' of Pluto by the International Astronomical Union, many members of the public, in our experience, assume that alleged 'non-planets' cease to be interesting enough to warrant scientific exploration.”
The scientists suggest planets should constitute as “round objects in space that are smaller than stars,” thus excluding white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes from the planetary status.
"A planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters," the proposal elaborates, noting that the Earth's moon would constitute as a planet under the new definition.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Lopez
Bookmarks