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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
It turns out that Earth is not a planet. Asteroid 2016 H03, first spotted on April 27, 2016, by the Pan-STARRS 1 asteroid survey telescope on Haleakala, Hawaii, is a companion of Earth, too distant to be considered a true satellite.
"Since 2016 HO3 loops around our planet, but never ventures very far away as we both go around the sun, we refer to it as a quasi-satellite of Earth," said Paul Chodas, manager of NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Asteroid 2016 H03 is proof that Earth has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Therefore, under the definition of a planet vigorously defended by the IAU [International Astronomical Union] since the adoption of Resolution 5A on August 24, 2006, Earth is a 'dwarf planet' because it has not cleared its orbit, which is the only criteria of their definition that Pluto fails. (I think we'll eventually discover that very few of the 'planets' have cleared their orbits).
Most of us who were baffled by the IAUs declaration and outraged at the obvious discrimination of Pluto knew there was something wrong, even if we couldn't put our finger on it — we just 'knew' Pluto was a planet, right?
[...] Here's what all of us non-scientists intuitively understood all along: "A planet is defined as an astronomical body that "has not undergone nuclear fusion, and having sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape" — in other words, it's round and not on fire.
How could the distinguished scientists be so wrong?
-- submitted from IRC
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @12:00AM
Lagrange points get the same "special consideration" as orbital resonances, such as the 1:1 resonance of "quasi-satellites" like 2016 HO3 with Earth, and 2:3 resonance like Pluto and the other plutinos have with Neptune.
Nobody serious denies that there's a useful distinction to be made between bodies such as Jupiter, which control a large region of space, and smaller bodies like asteroids and plutinos whose orbits are controlled by a nearby body in the first group, and the various criteria proposed to discriminate these classes of bodies are more in agreement than not, and all take such things into account. The disagreement is whether this classification, regarding a body's dynamical effects in relation to the rest of the solar system should be part of the definition of a planet, or whether planethood should be determined solely by properties of the body itself, and the dynamical classification should be another layer on top. (IAU tried to split the difference with "planet" and "dwarf planet", which is just a horrible naming convention.)