Pluto Is Not A Dog

It Might Not Ecven Be A Planet
That's according to this article.

"The pivotal question is the status of Pluto, which is clearly very different from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune," Owen Gingerich, professor of Astronomy and History of Science emeritus a the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told Reuters.

Debate has raged within the scientific community over the status of Pluto for decades after the planet was found to be only one four-hundredths of the mass of the earth.

That discussion intensified in 2003 when astronomers at the California Institute of Technology discovered UB 313. Nicknamed Xena after the character in the television show, UB 313 is one of more than a dozen celestial bodies in our solar system found to be larger than Pluto.

Xena and Pluto are large icy bodies that reside in the Kuiper Belt -- where thousands of floating bodies travel -- beyond Neptune. Images from the Hubble Space Telescope put Xena's diameter at 1,490 miles or so. That is slightly bigger than Pluto, which measures 1,422 miles across.

Well more planets as opposed to fewer would be gas. Seems to be a spoilsport sort of mentation that wants to *sowngrade* Pluto from a planet to *something else without a name yet*. That's just me, though.

UPDATE:
Reuters is now reporting that the solar planet numbers may go from 9 to 12.

PRAGUE (Reuters) - The question of whether Pluto is a real planet, hotly debated by scientists for decades, came to a head on Wednesday when the global astronomers' body proposed a definition of a planet that raises their number to 12 from nine.

The definition set out by a committee of the International Astronomers Union (IAU) answers the key question: How small can a body be and still be called a planet? in a way that leaves Pluto's status intact -- but modified.

Some 2,500 astronomers and scientists from round the world, attending an IAU conference in the Czech capital, have to weigh the committee's two-part definition, on which IAU members will vote on August 24.

To be called a planet, a celestial body must be in orbit around a star while not itself being a star, and must be large enough in mass for its own gravity to pull it into a nearly spherical shape, the seven-member committee said.

The need to define, for the first time, what it takes to be a planet stems from technological advances that enable astronomers to look further into space and to measure more precisely the size of celestial bodies in our solar system.

Pluto would remain a planet but would fall into a newly created category called Plutons, which are distinguished from classical planets in that they take longer than 200 years to orbit the sun.

Pluto would be joined in this category by two other celestial bodies, Xena and Charon, while another, Ceres, would be known as a dwarf planet.

In all, 12 planets would be listed in our solar system, at least for the time being.

12!
And the only thing Forbes can think of is the new wave of textbooks and toys that will make for better business.

The idea that our nine-planet solar system may soon join the obsolete world of eight-track tapes and slide rules should send science teachers, textbook writers and toymakers back to the cosmic drawing board.

"Does it make our products obsolete?" asked Kim McLynn, spokeswoman for Illinois-based Learning Resources, which makes an inflatable solar system and a Planet Quest game. "Wow, a whole new universe."

Though not approved yet, the 76-year-old lineup of the solar system's planets would grow to 12 under a proposal by leading astronomers. Their recommendation will be decided by a vote of the International Astronomical Union on Aug. 24.

For people who make their living on the old Mercury-through-Pluto system, a change in the planets means quick but welcome revisions, no matter how costly.

"This is, of course, a huge headache for publishers," said Gilbert Sewall, director of the American Textbook Council, a New York-based research institute that follows educational textbooks. Last-minute changes are expensive, but won't break any publisher, he said.

For example, Pearson Prentice Hall has science texts for next year going before California's textbook approval board and will try to get the 12-planet revision in for the state officials to review, said Julia Osborne, the publisher's science editorial director.

"It's worth it because this is such an exciting thing," Osborne said. But 2006 textbooks are already at schools, she said, so for "most students this fall it will be out of date."

Because schools keep textbooks for five to 10 years, it will be about seven years before most school books have 12 planets in them, said Osborne and Sewall.

Pity Jack Horkheimer, director of the Miami Space Transit Planetarium and host of PBS' "Star Gazer" show. His very first book, a full-length cartoon guide to naked-eye astronomy, features an entire chapter on the solar system - the nine-planet version.

It won't be out for four more weeks - after the world's astronomers are likely to open the solar system doors to three new planets: Ceres, Charon, and one nicknamed Xena to be renamed later.

"My book is out-of-date before it even hits the bookstands," Horkheimer said. "It's kind of like buying a computer. By the time you get it out of the box and get it hooked up, it's already obsolete."

At the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, the main pavilion has a model of the solar system - the sun and nine planets (Earth is the size of a softball). The planetarium will likely have to add three new planets.

"They're pretty small," said astronomy director Geza Gyuk of the proposed new planets. "Maybe we can bring in a pingpong ball and that'll do the trick."

The Adler already has a planetary anachronism. When it opened 76 years ago, plaques had already been commissioned for just eight planets. Pluto was discovered a few months laterGyuk doesn't see the Adler adding plaques for Pluto or the three proposed planets because "we just don't have space."

For the several thousand planetariums around the world, this is more exciting than difficult, said Susan Reynolds Button, president-elect of the International Planetarium Society.

"It's not a problem," Reynolds Button said. "We already have the visuals. We already have the equipment to do it. It's just a matter of presenting new data."

Reynolds Button, who used to take planetarium shows to schools, said the addition of three new planets "is a real nice juicy topic to get kids excited about."

Dan Reidy, a sixth-grade science teacher in Moultonborough, N.H., was sitting in his classroom preparing for the new school year and gazing at his model of the solar system. He usually asks his students, "What's wrong with this picture?" The correct answer is that the planet sizes and their distances from the sun are all out of proportion.

If the planet lineup changes, there will be something else wrong with his model.

Reidy will also have to figure out where to place the new planets on a large parachute-cloth solar system map that demonstrates proper size and scale, but he said it was exciting.

The race to change solar system toys more permanently is already on.

Discovery Channel Store spokeswoman Pamela Rucker predicted new 12-planet toys could be in stores in time for the Christmas season.

"We're already starting to work on 12 planets," said McLynn of Learning Resources.

The more things change...

Idiot Watch
This is tragic.

The latest issue of Science has a statistical analysis that gets into some of the whys and hows of the strange relationship the US public has with the science of evolution. The results are really best analyzed in two parts. The first compares the US's acceptance of evolution with that in 32 European countries plus Japan. The results produce the graph at right (it's part of the original article, but has been reproduced in several locations on the web already, so I'll join in). The US places next-to-last both in terms of accepting the accuracy of the theory of evolution, and in terms of considering it absolutely false. The country we're racing to the bottom is Turkey, which news reports suggest has some obvious issues with both the quality of the national education system and religious fundamentalism. Edging us out is Cyprus, which is currently partitioned as the result of a centuries-old conflict.


But within the grim figures generated by the "Yes/No/Unsure" question are some interesting subtleties. When asked whether species adapt and go extinct over millions of years in a question that did not use the term "evolution," nearly 80 percent of US respondents felt it was true; only six percent called the statement false. Which is good, until you consider that this indicates that the majority of the public must have no grasp of the concept underlying all of biology. The lack of scientific literacy also came screaming through in indications that nearly half the respondents had no idea about the degree to which humans share DNA sequences with other mammals, and half were either unsure or wrong about whether early humans shared the planet with dinosaurs. The high degree of uncertainty probably explains why at least two percent of respondents could apparently agree that humans both did and did not evolve from earlier species. The authors also note that the amount of uncertainty over evolution has actually increased in the last 10 years.

It's interesting while at the same time being absolutely awful.