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Scientists against the demotion of objects like Pluto, Eris, Sedna, etc. to "dwarf planet" status have crafted a new definition:
It's no secret that Alan Stern and other scientists who led the New Horizons mission were extremely displeased by Pluto's demotion from planet status in 2006 during a general assembly of the International Astronomical Union. They felt the IAU decision undermined the scientific and public value of their dramatic flyby mission to the former ninth planet of the Solar System.
But now the positively peeved Pluto people have a plan. Stern and several colleagues have proposed a new definition for planethood. In technical terms, the proposal redefines planethood by saying, "A planet is a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters." More simply, the definition can be stated as, "round objects in space that are smaller than stars."
From the proposal:
The eight planets recognized by the IAU are often modified by the adjectives "terrestrial," "giant," and "ice giant," yet no one would state that a giant planet is not a planet. Yet, the IAU does not consider dwarf planets to be planets. We eschew this inconsistency. Thus, dwarf planets and moon planets such as Ceres, Pluto, Charon, and Earth's Moon are "fullfledged" planets. This seems especially true in light of these planets' complex geology and geophysics. While the degree of internal differentiation of a given world is geologically interesting, we do not use it as a criterion for planethood in the spirit of having an expansive rather than a narrow definition.
Here's another article about the significance of the New Horizons mission. New Horizons will fly by 2014 MU69 on January 1, 2019.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday February 23 2017, @04:21AM
None of the science matter is affected by classifying Pluto one way or the other, so the state of knowledge is irrelevant for the purposes of evaluating how traditional something is.
And as I noted, planets which can't be seen with the naked eye aren't traditional in the very sense you invoked at the time.
The decision to dump it was not taken lightly, either, but was a result of a prolonged discussion. And increasing the number of planets 10- or 100-fold by admitting a bunch of snowballs with absolutely no seniority seems much less of a break with tradition than dumping 11% of least senior planets.
Sure it was a prolonged discussion. Sounded more like an afternoon vote packed by the side that wanted to throw out Pluto. Second, how traditional again is it to call something a "dwarf planet" and then say it's not a real "planet"? Potentially hundreds of objects just fell into that silly semantics game.