> > Story below--see also Phil Plait's thoughts:
>
> I pretty much concur with his last point and remain disinterested -- not neutral, disinterested -- in everything else. It is astronomically (!) silly to make an issue of this, and even sillier for anybody outside of IAU to care what they decide. Pluto remains a planet as long as I call it a planet. What difference does it make what arbitrary parameters some body of scientists somewhere places on terms whose distinction lacks practical benefit? Frankly, the word "planet" belongs more to common use than science anyhow, and so a particular scientific community doesn't really have the power to change its meaning except to itself.

Personally, I think they're right to define Pluto as not-a-planet. I far prefer this definition to the one being thrown around a week ago, that would have had Pluto, Charon, Ceres and UB2003 (provisionally named "Xena") as all being planets. Not to mention the thousands of other balls of ice of Pluto's size in the outer reaches of the solar system.

Where I think the new definition is completely, utterly, pointlessly stupid is in clause (1)(a), which specifies that to be a planet, a body must be "in orbit around the Sun" - that is to say, the 204 currently known objects in orbit around other stars that are commonly known as "extrasolar planets" are no longer classified as planets. Even though many of them are larger than Jupiter.

That's just stupid.