Quote:
Originally posted by Bozos of Bones:
They made this oh-so-complicated definition of a planet, that is pretty stupid if you ask me. By the definition, Earth, Saturn and Jupiter would also not be planets. They are taking it under further revisement, last I heard.
First they wanted to make it 12, then they saw that the 3 they wanted in (Xena, Sedna and Quaoar) were no different from a few other bodies in the solar system, by definition(Ceres, Charon, Orcus, Varuna etc.), and pretty soon, we'd have a solar system of 200 planets. Making the word "Planet" worthless.
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I have to disagree with you here, Bozos...The definition requires fairly reasonable, planetary things...it must orbit around the Sun. The body must have attained a rounded, equal-energy shape through it's own gravity, and must have cleared it's own orbit of other debris.
The Earth, Saturn, and Jupiter have all done this...heck, Jupiter has cleared a couple
more orbits than it's own, and is most of the reason we have eight planets instead of nine (I'm refering to the asteroid belt.
Sure, there's debris left, but in all honesty, since it's orders of magnitude smaller, it's negligible.
Horray for the scientific community not caving to public pressure on this one. I mean, really, if we're wrong, we're supposed to fix things, not just let them continue on their merry little way.