OT: The solar system has 12 planets

[AngleWyrm]

It would be a minor thing if you were the only student. It would be a more serious thing if for instance, a large number of students were sent a bill for $70, for a fictitious book replacement. One might even suspect foul play and pocket money.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I'm not a lawyer, so I can't give you legal advice, but...

It perhaps might be a good idea to contact other students in your chemistry class and ask them if they also recieved a bill. Right now, it's your word against his.

[kalthalior]

There's still alot of controversy regarding this, a competing proposal has been put forth demoting Pluto to "dwarf planet" status.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronom...t_newprop.html

[Renegade 13]

From the previous link:

...the competing proposal, which inserts the criterion that a planet must be 'by far the largest body in its population of bodies'...

To me, this seems like a far worse proposal than a definition based upon gravity. After all, it's extremely ambiguous. They'd first have to define "By far the largest"; how much larger? 50%? 100%? 200? They'd also have to define "Population of bodies". By this would they include all of the Kuiper Belt as being part of the whole Pluto area population? That defines an absolutely massive area. If you're going to include that many cubic light-minutes as an area in which you can only have one planet and it has to be a lot bigger than anything else, then why not include all of the solar system up to Jupiter as being another area? After all, even with that great an area included as a "population of bodies", it would still be a hell of a lot smaller than the entire Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud region which, it sounds like, this proposal wants to have recognized as being a single "population of bodies". If that were the case, only Jupiter would be a planet! Even it might not make it, since Saturn is relatively close in size. Come to think of it, by the strict application of this definition, you probably wouldn't have ANY planets in the solar system! Nothing could meet the criteria!

Whew. Hope that made sense, though I doubt it did. Even I can barely decipher what I meant to say!

[Kamog]

Now the astronomers might go back to a 8-planet solar system, removing Pluto from the list of planets. We'll see what happens...

New Scientist Article

[Rollo]

They removed Pluto's planet status. By the new definition of 'planet' we have only 8 planets in the solar system.

Good decision, methinks.

[narf poit chez BOOM]

I like pluto.