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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy is PLUTO not a planet? UK's Public Astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich tells all...
One of the most divisive issues in modern scicence...
Pluto lost its status as a planet in 2006 but its reclassification as a "dwarf" world actually puts it into an exciting new category.
Dr Marek Kukula, the Public Astronomer at the Royal Observatory Greenwich, charts the history of the diminutive object that orbits some five billion kilometres from the Sun.
But, the debate rages on - just look at the comments under the video on YouTube!
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Why is PLUTO not a planet? UK's Public Astronomer at Royal Observatory Greenwich tells all... (Original Post)
Surya Gayatri
Jul 2015
OP
Gloria
(17,663 posts)1. On yhe NOVA show the other night they said part of the new
definition was that the body had to be big enough so thst it was sble to create a "clesr"area around it...they were finding other bodies even bigger than Pluto, and saw the Kuiper belt and Pluto being less a planet because it was more like those objects...so it was demoted to "dwarf plnet."
HFRN
(1,469 posts)2. demoting pluto was planetist
note we're not even allowed to capitalize the name anymore
The2ndWheel
(7,947 posts)3. Pluto is just a name we came up with for an object in space
As is the word planet. The only place those words mean anything is in our own minds. I say call or classify Pluto whatever or however you want, because we already do. That it's divisive only shows how crazy and silly humans can be.