They Came from Pluton...

The International Astronomical Union has been spending the last week debating whether Pluto should continue to be called a planet or not. If memory serves, this is a question that has been on the minds of astronomers for quite a few years and have only gotten around to seriously debating now.

One proposal is that there be a new category of celestial objects known as "plutons" that are objects that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune and have highly ellpitical orbits (I will note here that I read one news report that said "non-circular" orbits, which would make every planet around the sun ineligible to be a planet by virtue of the fact that no planet has a circular orbit - the semi-major axis != semi-minor axis :) ).

There is talk that this makes school learning about astronomy a lot harder because suddenly there are so many other objects to "learn" in school. I actually think this is a great idea - we'd be getting kids to build a larger scientific vocabulary, encourage them to think in terms of a "bigger universe" out there, and also perhaps get them to build their critical thinking skills along the way.