Dumping Pluto for a new planet

[Laurinha]

I'm sure I heard something about scientists finding a new planet and were thinking about dumping Pluto as it's tiny and counting this new planet instead - was that real or did I make it up?

[Loosehead]

Pluto, along with several others have been reclassified as dwarf planets. Pluto is very small and has an orbit offset to the plane of the rest of the solar system, if discovered today it would not be classed as a planet. There is also Eris, initially known as "Xena", even smaller, orbiting outside Pluto, and of course "ceres" the largest member of the asteroid belt.

[jake-the-peg]

It's not it's orbit that has it reclassified but the fact that "it has failed to clear the neighbourhood around it's orbit"

http://www.iau.org/fileadmin/content/pdfs/Reso lution_GA26-5-6.pdf

If this sounds a bit contrived that's not too surprising. We've started to discover really quite a lot of objects furthre out than Neptune which are not all that different to Pluto and really ought to have been defined as planets. The IAU didn't want to be announcing a new planet every year so they orchestrated a bit of a coup against Pluto and introduced the above criteria.

However I think it'll take more than an IAU resolution to shift Pluto from the popular imagination.

(and I'm still waiting for Disney to sue!)