What do you know? We now have 8 planets in our solar system…. ( Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune… ) Nope Pluto has not blow up or anything… It’s just that it’s planetary status has just been downgraded to a category know as “dwarf planet”. Who’s to blame? Eris.

“A distant, icy rock whose discovery shook up the solar system and led to Pluto’s planetary demise has been given a name: Eris. Since its discovery last year, Eris ignited a debate about what constitutes a planet. Astronomers were split over how to classify the object because there was no universal definition. Some argued it should be welcomed as the 10th planet since it was larger than Pluto, but others felt Pluto was not a full-fledged planet.
After much bickering, astronomers last month voted to shrink the solar system to eight planets, downgrading Pluto to a dwarf planet, a category that also includes Eris and the asteroid Ceres.”

Think all the textbooks and encyclopedias in the world are due for serious overhaul…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 14th, 2006 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Discoveries, Nature & Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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