Originally published at: Planet-killing astronomer who downgraded Pluto looks for a replacement | Boing Boing
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Planet 9 from outer space!
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“Hey, Planet-Killer; you killed it, you eat it!”
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I think it’s Giedi Prime (Gammu) from DUNE
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It’s remarkable that astronomers were able to locate 4,000+ exoplanets, some as far as 13,000 light years away, and yet have difficulty determining if there any additional planets in our own solar system.
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Do we want Yuggoth? Because that’s how we get Yuggoth.
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This little ditty always makes us feel better about the demotion (see the end of the 8 planets song for the setup…)
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All these years later and I still find the rationale for changing Pluto’s designation arbitrary and unconvincing.
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to be fair, we don’t know if there are any additional planets in those systems either. 
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Don’t think of it as a demotion, it’s a promotion. Pluto is now King of the Plutoids instead of the smallest (smaller than our own moon) planet in the system.
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It’s still an arbitrary distinction. By almost any measure other than their respective locations Mars has more in common with Pluto than either body has in common with Jupiter, yet Mars and Jupiter are classified under the same category while Pluto is not.
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And really, did puny Mars actually clear out its own orbit, or did big-brother Jupiter do most of the dirty work for it?
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It already crosses a different planets orbit so im gonna go with even before reclassification that little bugger was already an “asteroid”
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you need to stop thinking like a planetologist, and start thinking like an astronomer. More robotic probes are expensive, and will inevitably eat into the budget for telescopes. Why visit a planet-like object when you can tell from a distance, whether it is an interesting enough object to have cleared the orbit.
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Why don’t we ask Ceres?
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The status quo and all the other proposed definitions were arbitrary too.
Personally, I would have been happy with the original definiton that was proposed in 2006
A planet is a celestial body that (a) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (b) is in orbit around a star, and is neither a star nor a satellite of a planet.
That would have left us with 12 planets in 2006, including Pluto and Charon (it isn’t in orbit around Pluto). People complained that it would leave us with too many planets though, there were already at least 12 more candidates at the time, and possibly over 50.
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This last stamp’s words inspired the Pluto-Kuiper Express mission proposal-- which was later incorporated into New Horizons.
A dumb reason to spend hundreds of millions of dollars? maybe.
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I find that argument even less convincing. It would be like if biologists came up with an arbitrary new definition of fungi because they were overwhelmed once they realized how many kinds of fungi there are.
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