Should Pluto be reclassified as a planet?

Which are the criteria for a planet? Does Pluto orbit another planet?

Yes, Pluto should be reclassified as a Planet, because historically it was a planet.

By the way, we make every day tons of scientific mistakes, but nobody notices it, like the Indians in America. They were named Indians because the early explorers thought they had landed in the Indian peninsula, but they had nothing to do with India. The name of the early inhabitants was later changed to Amerindians, but it never caught up.

Sunset and Sunrise, it not because the Sun goes down or up, but because the Earth rotates. We should say the “Earth-end-of-the-day-rotation” or something like that. But nobody cares and sunset and sunrise are familiar expressions although not correct. Likewise, we say kilometre-hour and not kilometre per hour, the latter being right because speed is distance over time and not multiplied by time.

I could add many examples like that. I have sympathy for Pluto and I don’t like downgrading it.

Keep then Pluto as a planet or a dwarf planet, along with Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemak.

But I am ready to bet with you, that Trump will require that one of these dwarf planets be named Donald Trump. Didn’t he change the name of the Gulf of Mexico and of the Lake Ontario? However, he will neve understand the difference between a moon, a planet, an asteroid, and so on.

Bernard Guillaume

I have no nostalgia for anything in the realm of empirical science, so no, Pluto as a non-planet has never purturbed me. I strive for having the scientific attitude in empirical matters, i.e., caring about evidence and having the humility to change my mind when new evidence is uncovered and also when I'm just flat wrong (I don't succeed way too many times). I'm nearly 79 so my lack of notalgia here is not because I'm too young to have any!

I’m with the scientist. Yes, Pluto, you were adopted. We still love you though, and now all these children’s authors get to write books about you. Might actually spark some badly needed early interest in science.

Mike Brown’s argument that the Moon would also be a planet is ridiculous, the Moon does NOT revolve about the Sun.

However, Pluto has NOT cleared its orbit, which is now part of the IAU definition of a planet. If Pluto were re-instated then potentially thousands of other Kuiper Belt objects have to be classified as a planets too.

Science constantly reclassifies things as new data becomes available, that is part of the scientific process

The morons who argue that nostalgia is a good enough reason need to go back to high school and revise their science clssses.

If Pluto is a planet, at least one Planet was discovered by an american astronomer. That‘s the real reason for this stupid discussion: american chauvinism!

It was a pointless waste of time. What new insight or discoveries did the renaming of Pluto bring? Answer ... None.

It was already casually regarded as the largest of the Minor Planets. (What happened to the Minor Planets?)

It was as if a bunch of geologists got together and decided that a Hill becomes a Mountain after, say, 500 meters.

(Could be difficult in the Himalayas, where the Foothills are higher than most of the world's highest mountains.)

at this time, who really cares? Go on to better things. Leave it be with caveats.

the moon is more of a rocky inner planet than pluto is an outer planet. The gas giant outer planets have nothing in common with pluto. Keep pluto as a "planet" to appease history. However, make it clear that it has more in common with an Oort cloud body than a planet. Maybe a century's long mission lander will put the debate at rest.

it would mess up textbooks.

also I agree with whoever said that it's orbit is too slow to clear its path.. and I also believe that it eventually will clear its path so instead of calling it a dwarf planet you could have called it a protoplanet... but I agree with who also said that this guy just wants to be famous by being the guy that got rid of Pluto as a planet which would have gotten him way more Fame than his so called a seven other discoveries... it's ridiculous that astronomers have nothing better to do then taking away a planets status... Neil's deGrasse Tyson gets so offended if anybody calls Pluto planet... what's it to him what anybody calls Pluto and what's it to Mr Brown.... if I look in the telescope do I get to name whatever I see.. because I see a rock rotating around the Sun and there's nothing else in its path I'm calling it a planet

I think him comparing Pluto to our moon is very misleading... because unless I'm incorrect which I didn't see anything in the article that led me to believe this, the moon rotates around Earth the other moons rotate around other planets Pluto rotates around the Sun... he didn't identify the other seven bodies he discovered but the asteroid and other worlds that should be included I'm pretty sure either stay in place or rotate around another planet... this is why Pluto was made a planet to begin with... I'm not saying that we should go and promote Pluto back to being a planet because I'm pretty sure all the scientists that vote on it would convince their colleagues to not acknowledge it ... but it appears to me that they found a way to make Pluto lose its planethood status by saying that didn't clear its neighborhood well the moon cleared its neighborhood and it's not a planet so his definition isn't well rounded and his metaphor is moot

No, Pluto is not a planet.

Rename Pluto and see what happens. Let's rename it Asphalt. See there? Just like that, nobody cares anymore.

Pluto is what it is. The words planet, moon, asteroid, and whatever are human constructs made for human convenience. It's the same argument as whether viruses are alive, tomatoes are vegetables, or hot dogs are sandwiches. You could say that planets are wandering stars and there are only five.

Humanity hasn’t agreed in how many continents are on Earth and you expect them to agree on the number of planets in the solar system?

If you want to consider Pluto a planet, then go ahead; who's going to stop you? If you'd rather consider it something else, that is also your prerogative.

Yes. Despite the technicalities, just declare Pluto an exception and go on to more important issues. Science should not be the battlefield of another culture war.

Try as I might, I cannot think of a scientific question of less importance than this one.

I'm not an astronomer, and I'm glad that most people agree with the simple, standard name: it is a planet. This Mike Brown just wants to have his name on Pluto. Pay for a mission to SpaceX, and soon someone in the future will remember him.

Be a planet. I don't care if the moon is not. The moon is a satellite of the Earth, Pluto turns around the Sun

I think nostalgia should play a part. Sure it doesn’t meet all of the criteria (has Neptune cleared its orbit? Pluto is in it), but it could be used to inform why there aren’t 30 (or however many) other planets similar in size etc.

‘Pluto doesn’t technically meet the standards of what we now define as a planet, but out of respect for previous generations of astronomers it is included’

No.

There are two moons in the solar system larger that Mercury. It we find out something in the Kuiper Belt, or on the far side of it, bigger than Mercury (the so-called ninth planet), it probably won't be clearing a path for itself very efficiently, given its real slow orbit. If we find something even bigger, maybe in the Oort cloud, what would we call that? The Oort cloud doesn't revolve like something in or inside the Kuiper Belt. The Oort cloud extends halfway to Proxima Centauri. There are rogue planets outside any solar system. Is it OK to call those planets? Many of them are pretty big and don't move much dust or other matter out of their way. When a solar system is developing, planets interact with each other and the star. It's not unusual for really big planets to get kicked out of the system. What do you call them? We have renamed some asteroids "minor planets." There are asteroids that have moons.

A fundamental problem is that across the millennia humans have had this habit of labelling things and then somehow thinking we "know" a thing because we've put a tag on it. But nature is filled with grey scales / grandients.

Regarding Pluto, it was discovered about a hundred years ago with the telescope power we had available at the time, and it was large enough then to be discerned as a body orbiting the sun. We did not discover it to be revolving around a larger planet, so while it may be comparable to some of our solar system moons in size, it is Not a moon. It's revolving around the sun, and nothing else.

In terms of categorization, perhaps when we discover objects that are comparable in size to the moons of Jupiter, Saturn or Earth that are revolving solo around the sun, we could simply use the term "planetoid." That would to some degree be amenable to those who insist it's not big enough to be formally classified as a planet, as well as those who have regarded it as a planet since 1930.

A further complication is when we find moon-sized bodies floating among and alongside other cosmic debris, all of it revolving around the sun like the asteroid or Kuyper belts.

'Planetoid' seems like a reasonable classification we could assign to Pluto and other bodies of similar scale, not captured within the gravitational field of a larger local body, while revolving around the sun. But in order to do that, humankind would have to decide what diameter is "too small" to be considered a full-on planet. And when we truly think about deciding on that dimension, we may realize how truly subjective and even arbitrary these perceptions and classifications are. We're just hurtling through space, making stuff up, and every once in a while, finding aspects of nature upon which we can agree.