Official News - page 6

REAL LIFE NEWS: CORRECTION - PLUTO LOSES PLANET STATUS AFTER ALL

Damn astronomers, why can't they make up their minds? Last week I reported on the proposal for sorting out the question of whether Pluto was or was not a planet, and along with just about all the other media I assumed the solution which was due to be voted on this week was a foregone conclusion. How wrong I was! Instead of being voted through, the proposal to keep Pluto as a planet and include such bodies as Charon, Xena and Ceres as well, was replaced with a completely different system.

So it's official: Pluto is not, after all, a planet. The Solar System planets have been reduced to eight (which I shouldn't have to list for Fed players who can be assumed to know these things, but here goes anyway: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune).

• The new rules define a planet as follows:
• It must be in orbit around a star, without being a star itself
• It must be large enough in mass that its gravity means it has assumed a round or nearly round shape
• It must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit

It's this last rule that disqualifies Pluto, because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's and Neptune being much larger takes precedence.

So what is Pluto, if it's no longer a planet? It now joins a new category of "dwarf planets" which is defined by the first two rules but fails on the third criterion. Charon, Xena and Ceres do go into this category.

There is also a third category, "small Solar-System bodies", which encompasses anything else floating around in Sol which isn't a satellite of a planet. This will include most of the asteroids, most of the Trans-Neptunian Objects which lurk out in the Kuiper Belt and beyond, and comets.

This leaves some questions unanswered. First, what happens to all those useful mnenomics people use to remember the order of the planets? I always favored "Mother Very Easily Made a Jelly Sandwich Using No Peanuts", with the little "a" showing the position of the asteroid belt. I guess "no peanuts" will have to change to "nuts" instead!

What does it mean for NASA's mission to Pluto? New Horizons is on its way to the edge of the Solar System to investigate Pluto, Charon and objects beyond, with its arrival scheduled for July 2015. Even if Pluto is no longer considered a planet, this mission is set to tell us all kinds of fascinating things about the Solar System.

Also, how are astrologers going to cope with this sudden demotion? If Pluto is no longer a planet, can it still influence the lives of the gullible? I look forward to hearing the explanations horoscope-writers come up with for this change, unless they simply choose to ignore it of course!

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