It seems that astronomers have voted to remove Pluto off the list of planets.
The textbooks have to be rewritten everywhere in the world.
Children need to learn one planet less.

Now what are the astrologers going to tell.
Are they going to tell that they knew this was going to happen ?
At least I think people can stop believing astrologers who make things up for their own profit.

Well if there was a reason for it then ok. But what has changed. Pluto is still there isnt it and if it isnt a planet then what is it. Maybe because its that far away they just want to ignor it so they never have to think of studying it. Hell i dont know but there must be some scientific reason for it.

I think there was always a debate on whether Pluto was a planet or a huge meteor. I guess they finally decided? Though, this is the first time hearing about them making a decision to switch. I wonder if this is accurate in any way.

Now they have categorized the solarsystem objects as below -
( Quoted note is from http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/0608...definition.html )



These definition seems to be good and clear.
Every planet should have their neighbourhood cleared, this means, only big objects would qualify as planets, which is good, because whenever we think about planet, we think about life and in a small planet like Pluto, which is dead Rock, life cant sustain.

This is really interesting and will change the universe as we know it. They say they have found hundreds of dwarf planets and are now discussing on selling the names of the planets to whoever wants to buy it. I think that'd be really cool. The money would go to education/science industry. I would buy one but they'd be expensive. Think about it though, they'll be selling dwarf planets on Ebay or atleast the name of them.

I personally can't see how after all these years, a couple of astronomers have the power to announce pluto not a planet.

I agree with a couple of the above posts, pluto in my opinion still is a planet. It's just so far away that scientists didn't want to bother with it and declared it as not a planet.

It really is a shame that the children have to learn from changing text books and some people thinking that pluto is a planet and others not. I don't know why they didn't just keep it marked down as a planet. It certainly would have made life a lot easier and saved the bother of remembering which planet's been lost.

I guess, at the end of the day, that it's up to the scientists to decide which planets belong in the solar system though.

This post has been edited by sportytalk: Aug 24 2006, 10:12 PM

Just found out about this in the paper, all i have to say is that im very (fill in the blank) about this happen. Just because it's not doing what these "scientists" say it supposed to do doesn't give them the right to destroy 76 years of scientific history. They should have just left it alone until after the sattelite that was going to observe it got there.

Here's the worse part now all the books are wrong because of this descision that was made and to make it even more worse the kids in the elementary school will get confused as well since the tell will be telling them one thing while the book will tell them the other.

That of course will last 7 years until the books get updated from what i read a few weeks ago.

Regaurdless what our "intelliegent" scientists say pluto, though distant it is, I still consider it a a major planet in our solar system.

and to make everyone a bit more stupider wikipedia made the changes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluto

who know's maybe in a couple of months mercury will be taken off the list.

That is a little bit dispointing, but I don't think it will be followed up well. Practically every one the Earth (except scientists) know it as Pluto, the nine planet fro the Sun and that's what everyone taught their kids. They would have to majorly change all the textbooks and I can't see anyone recognizing it as a "dwarf planet" until many years. What kind of name is "dwarf planet" anyways?

As I said in this other thread here, I don't understand why scientists need to mess around bothering about whether pluto is a planet or whether it isn't.

It's quite a long way away, that it's hard to determine whether it's a planet or not as even the modern technology isn't really good enough to be able to measure the size etc. For simplicity sake, I feel planets shouldn't be able to be changed just by a couple of astronomers. There should have been more discussion on the topic rather than just hearing it's been changed.

Lots of children are now having to be retaught the planets and/or told that pluto no longer exists. However, I guess this may be for the best, as it's ensuring that children are being educated and taught the most correct information.

Ah well, I guess Pluto is still something out there in space that we're aware of, even if it's no longer cla