Oh! It is the open house for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory this weekend (both today and tomorrow)! I almost missed it since it was two weekends later last year.
Image composite brazenly taken from their website.
I went last year and had a great time and so I strongly recommend it. Go along for your own interest, of course, but if you have any kids, take ‘em along*. If interested, have a look at my detailed post from last year entitled “JPL the new Disneyland?”
As I said there:
The next Categorically Not! is on Sunday April 27th (upcoming). The Categorically Not! series of events that are held at the Santa Monica Art Studios, (with occasional exceptions). It’s a series - started and run by science writer K. C. Cole - of fun and informative conversations deliberately ignoring the traditional boundaries between art, science, humanities, and other subjects. I strongly encourage you to come to them if you’re in the area. Here is the website that describes past ones, and upcoming ones. See also the links at the end of the post for some announcements and descriptions (and even video) of previous events.
The theme this month is Loops Here’s the description from K C Cole:
When you come right down to it, just about everything is loopy: planets, proteins or life stories, things have a way of coming around again, always with a slightly different spin. This month’s Categorically Not! was conceived as a tribute to Douglas Hofstadter’s new book, I am a Strange Loop, which uses Continue reading ‘Categorically Not! - Loops’
Not quite as (juvenile) funny as the equivalent phrase when rings were discovered around the seventh planet, but it’ll do as a post title. I’ll tease you with the image here Continue reading ‘Rings Around Rhea’
A lovely release from the Hubble Heritage project. Well worth clicking on for more detail. The image was made using Hubble. It’s a planetary nebula (NGC 2371), the Continue reading ‘Warm and Fuzzy’
It’s not going to be naked-eye visible, but give a thought tonight to the 250 metre asteroid (2007 tu24) that is going to swing by close to earth tonight! Or, if you have a “modest” telescope, go and look at it. It’s going to scrape by at 1.4 times the distance of the moon. That’s pretty close, by astronomical standards, and gives scientists a chance to see a near earth object rather more closely than usual. From the Continue reading ‘Near Enough’
“Inside” meaning the inner part of the Solar System. “Messages” meaning the new pictures from MESSENGER spacecraft.
MESSENGER is short for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging. Now you and I know that they spent a bit of time coming up with the unpacking of the name, wanting of course to have the name MESSENGER because that’s what the Mercury of mythology was - the messenger of the Gods, among his other duties. Nice. However I’d have been really impressed if they’d managed to call it QUICKSILVER, and found a way to unpack that - any takers?
Anyway, I digress. In more news showing the triumph of the wisdom of relatively cheap unmanned exploratory craft, MESSENGER sent some wonderful pictures of Mercury this week, along with lots of other scientific data that will help us learn a great deal about the innermost planet. Here’s the one that’s been going around a lot (click for impressive larger version):
Image credit to NASA. Caption taken from a space.com article reads: This photo supplied by NASA Continue reading ‘Messages from Inside’
A little over a month from now, Mars might be hit by an asteroid! There’s a 1 in 75 chance (due to uncertainties about the exact trajectory), according to the people tracking the object’s progress right now. The 50 metre wide object is due to pass within 300000 miles of Mars at about 6 a.m. EST (3 a.m. PST) on Jan. 30, 2008. Quoting quite a bit from the press release from JPL/NASA:
Well, it is time for Round Two!
Recall that (as mentioned in my post with the doom-laden title) the Dawn mission was postponed by several months due to unfavourable launch conditions. Recall also that the celestial window for launching Dawn will not come again for another seventeen years, if it does not launch over the next couple of weeks or so! This is a bit scary therefore.
So the two week launch window is open, and Dawn is on the pad and ready to try to fly tomorrow, at around….. dawn. They’ve been preparing Dawn for this for a while now (you can see in the picture on the right some of the preparations - encasing it in the protective dressing for the rocket launch… I got this picture from this link and you can see more there), and from the press release of yesterday confirming that the mission is a “go”:
“If you live in the Bahamas this is one time you can tell your neighbor, with a straight face, that Dawn will rise in the west,” said Dawn Project Manager Keyur Patel of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. “Weather permitting, we are go for launch Thursday morning - a little after dawn.”
Dawn’s Sept. 27 launch window is 7:20 to 7:49 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time (4:20 to 4:49 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time). At the moment of liftoff, the Delta II’s first-stage main engine along with six of its nine solid-fuel boosters will ….
They also talk a bit about the science (also see later, below this):
Drat.
Well, maybe on the next flyby. Flyby page here. AP (via Yahoo) story by Alicia Chang here. Interesting extracts:
The international Cassini spacecraft went into safe mode this week after successfully passing over a Saturn moon that was the mysterious destination of a deep-space faring astronaut in Arthur C. Clarke’s novel “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
..and intriguingly:
In case you missed this earlier this week, there was an intriguing detective science story that, if correct, has yielded remarkable news about the past of our planet, and of course, us. From an AP story by Richard Ingham (via Yahoo):
The extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago can be traced to a collision between two monster rocks in the asteroid belt nearly 100 million years earlier, scientists report on Wednesday.
The smash drove a giant sliver of rock into Earth’s path, eventually causing the climate-changing impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs and enabled the rise of mammals — including, eventually, us.
(Image above: Simulation images (AFP/HO/Don Davis) of the asteroid collision event, and the resulting extinction collision event on earth, and the collision with the moon.)
The scientists are William Bottke, David Vokrouhlicky and David Nesvorny, working at the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado. They traced the rock to a collision event that took place in the inner parts of the asteroid belt somewhere about between 140-190 million years ago, producing the family of fragments collectively called the Baptistinas, the largest being Baptistina 298. Over time, some of the fragments found Continue reading ‘Origins of a Species-Killer?’
Let’s talk about aliens. I don’t mean people coming across the borders of whatever your country happens to be (although I did giggle a decade ago when I was given an official “alien number” by the powers that be back then - though I always regretted bypassing the “alien with extraordinary ability” status that the O1 visa gives you), I mean living creatures from beyond planet earth (it’s also interesting to consider the possibility that the seeds for life on earth may also have come from elsewhere).
It’s one of my favourite topics to consider, which is why I like to follow a lot of the remarkable things we are learning about our neighbouring planets (and other bodies like moons, asteroids, comets, and, yes minor planets like our old friend Pluto), and of course the ever-increasing variety of extra-solar planets (the ones we are discovering orbiting other stars). Overall, it gives one the sense that it is overwhelmingly likely that we are not alone (to use the tired old phrase), which to me is tremendously exciting.
I think we’ll find lots of compelling evidence that there’s lots of simple life on other bodies relatively soon, and I think that when people on the street hear of this, they’ll find it interesting enough. But I suspect that this will completely different to an Continue reading ‘They’re Out There (Probably)’
(Click for larger view. Shots of Uranus’ ring system as it gradually turns its edge to us (it does this once every 42 years). The final image was taken in August 2007. (I de Pater/H Hammel/W M Keck))
There’s a BBC news story about the research this enables astronomers to do, along Continue reading ‘Edgeways’
I’ve not had time to look at this closely, but there’s been some remarkable news about the possible detection of water in the atmosphere of an extra-solar planet. Wow!
Like I said, I’ve not a lot of time to look at this (Nature paper here), but thought you should know. I can point you to a press release by the Spitzer Space Telescope team, which starts:
A scorching-hot gas planet beyond our solar system is steaming up with water vapor, according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
The planet, called HD 189733b, swelters as it zips closely around its star every two days or so. Astronomers had predicted that planets of this class, termed “hot Jupiters,” would contain water vapor in their atmospheres. Yet finding solid evidence for this has been slippery. These latest data are the most convincing yet that hot Jupiters are “wet.”
“We’re thrilled to have identified clear signs of water on a planet that is trillions of miles away,” said Giovanna Tinetti, a European Space Agency fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris in France. ” Tinetti is lead author of a paper on HD 189733b appearing today in Nature.
I was just reading a bit about the spacecraft Phoenix (a mission to Mars to launch very Continue reading ‘Phoenix Mural’
Well, not until September at the earliest, that is. (Oh! That feels so good to have finally been able to use that as a post title!)
What am I talking about? NASA’s Dawn mission, of course. Dawn is a spacecraft that will go to the asteroid belt to study more closely the two largest asteroids, Ceres and Vesta. (Image right is an artist’s impression of the spacecraft. credit: William K. Hartmann, Courtesy of UCLA) In addition to the mission page linked above, there’s also a nice Wikipedia article about it here.
Last Thursday was to be the launch, but there were problems due to weather (mostly) - you don’t want to be fueling the tanks of the launch vehicle when there is high risk of lightning, as there was that day. There’s more about the matters on the NASA site, and also and Amara’s post on Scientific Blogging.
Actually, her post there is extremely informative about the goals of the mission, and Continue reading ‘There Will Be No Dawn’
What is this? The story behind this is just hilarious! I laughed out loud for a good while. Continue reading ‘Astronomy Picture of the Day’
After reading an article about how the “trickle of planet discoveries” as become a “flood” -referring to the many discoveries of extrasolar planets that are being announced these days, since they first started being discovered in 1995 1988/9 (there are more than 200 known now)- I looked at space.com’s “top ten most intriguing extrasolar planets”.
[Update: First detection of extrasolar planets is probably more accurately to be dated 1988/9. The first confirmed one was in 1995, but the planet Gamma_Cephei_Ab, detected in 1988(9) by two separate teams, took until 2002 to be confirmed. See e.g. here for more. Thanks commenter molliska!]
Have a look at that interesting article about the pace of discovery, and then when you’re done, peruse the top ten here. You’ll find:
Remember our discussions of Pluto’s demotion/reclassification? (Lots of link reminders at bottom of post.) Well, here’s a sad (and amusing) image* created by artist Mathias Pedersen:
You can see a high resolution version of this image here. Don’t forget to look at more of the graphic art of Mathias Pedersen**.
Poor Pluto indeed!
(Take some time to appreciate how good a job he’s done on colours and other Continue reading ‘Poor Pluto!’
So the planet hunter Corot has found its first extra-solar planet. It is a bit bigger than Jupiter, and orbiting awfully close to its sun-like star. Artist’s impression, from ESA, to the right. Click for larger.
From a BBC article by Rebecca Morelle:
The new body is called Corot-exo-1b and can be found 1,500 light-years away in the constellation of Monoceros.
also:
Spotted on the BBC News website: A story about the discovery of an earth-like (or at least more Earth-like than Jupiter-like) planet in the “Goldilocks” zone of a star a mere 20 light years or so away!
Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile.
They say the benign temperatures on the planet mean any water there could exist in liquid form, and this raises the chances it could also harbour life.
“We have estimated that the mean temperature of this ’super-Earth’ lies between 0 and 40 degrees Celsius, and water would thus be liquid,” explained Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory, lead author of the scientific paper reporting the result.
“Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth’s radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky - like our Earth - or covered with oceans.”
Reading a bit further on:
Continue reading ‘Another Earth?’
You can read more on the Cassini site about this wonderful shot of Saturn from a Continue reading ‘A New Angle on Saturn’
There’s a nice story about new photographic evidence from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter for water having flowed on Mars. It is not really as dramatic as the photographs of late last year, but it is still an important piece of the puzzle overall (so do read about it), if harder to sell to the public as a “stop-the-press!” type of story. So here’s how three different news agencies tried to bring you in:
Not bad. The layering and colour gradations seen are is not direct evidence of water, of course. It could have been some other fluid flow, but…ok.
Next, we have:
Continue reading ‘Mars Attracts!’
The Bad Astronomy Blog gives a top ten list of astronomy images for 2006. There are some really wonderful choices there, and Phil Plait gives a good deal of discussion of each one. The winner is this fantastic back-lit (by the sun, not some giant NASA flashgun) image of Saturn taken -of course- by the Cassini mission:
Now there’s another wonderful feature of this photo that makes it such a clear winner. Continue reading ‘A Different Perspective’
This is a diagram of the layout of the equipment on the Corot (COnvection, ROtation and planetary Transits) space telescope, launched recently from a site in Kazakhstan.
It’s a European Space Agency (ESA) mission, primarily run by the Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales (CNES - the French Space Agency, if you will) and it’s going to be looking closely at about 120,000 stars for signs of planetary bodies in orbit around them, in addition to studying the stars themselves. There’s a BBC story here, with video, more figured and images, and links to other sites, such as this condensed mission guide. The Proteus platform in the diagram refers to that fact that this is but one of a series of craft in the “Proteus” series, the platform itself being the design of the core containing the instrumentation and control systems of the device. Learn more about that here.
By going over to ESA’s site, you can learn a lot more about the scientific objectives Continue reading ‘Planet Hunter’
In case you have not heard, NASA announced today that they have evidence that water flows on Mars. That’s the present tense, note. Not flowed some time ago - flows currently (albeit perhaps only in intermittent bursts). Here’s the link to their announcement. The picture:
An extract:
The Eye of Sauron is rising again, but now on Saturn!?
No, here’s what’s actually going on:
On the site Space.com, I found a nice article by David Powell about the Cassini spacecraft’s future. (Cassini has done some wonderful work recently, including bringing us wonderful images such as the one below of Titan and Epimetheus, and Saturn’s rings.)
Cassini’s NASA handlers are wondering about what they will do with it when its mission is over. Here are some of the options they are considering: Continue reading ‘Better To Burn Out, Or To Fade Away?’
So I must apologize. I went to the preview of the Griffith Observatory so long ago now and did promise to blog about it with more than just one nice picture, but it did not happen. Partly because I had to go back across the Atlantic to do some work, and then got ill over the weekend I was planning to do it, and then...
Anyway, here are some of my thoughts. First note that my two week delay means that this is no longer a scoop, since even the LA Times had a spread on the whole thing on Thursday. A rather nice one as well. I urge you to consult it for a lovely pull-out graphic of the whole site. There is also a special website with picture tours, nifty 360 degree interactive shots of the spaces, and other information. The Griffith opened yesterday.
What they’ve done over the last four or five years is simply shut down the entire building and rethink and redo a great deal of it. How to preserve the lovely 70 year old landmark, while making it even better? Simple question - simple answer: Get $93 million for your project (I find this number, the earth-sun distance in miles, suspicious), and then go underneath the existing building and hollow out about the same amount of space that is has, but underground. Fill it with lots of goodies. And I mean lots and lots. What goodies? We’ll see.
Continue reading ‘Some Observations at Griffith Observatory’
Well, I’m back from the visit to the preview of the Griffith Observatory that I mentioned to you I was going to. It was a rather good visit. They organised it well, and -boy!- have they done a great job on the restorations! I’ll try and assemble the several pictures that I took into some sort of narrative for you, and report soon. While you wait, here’s one of my favourites:
This is particularly poignant, in my opinion. The children are looking at the lovely Continue reading ‘The Lives Of The Stars’
I forgot to tell you about this. The name Eris has been officially chosen by the International Astronomical Union for the astronomical body so many wanted to be called Xena. (Keck image, left) Eris is the goddess of discord and strife, by the way. The moon of the body, that was tentatively called Gabrielle, after Xena’s sidekick in the TV show (Universal Studios image, right) will be called Dysnomia.
The Xena supporting community will be disappointed about this decision (watch out IAU, they have sharp swords, see image on left), but maybe comforted a little by the fact that Dysnomia is “a spirit of lawlessness”. Recall that Xena was played by Lucy Lawless. (Whatever happened to her, by the way? I think I recall seeing her briefly in something last year.) Anyway, there’s a New York Times article about it, by Kenneth Chang, here. It’s a rather nice account of the saga of the naming, by Michael Brown (of Caltech), who discovered Eris.
Pluto, as part of its initiation into the family of rubble known as the Kuiper belt (a mass distribution so important to understanding our solar system…see here), has been given a number. It is minor planet number 134340. I hope you can remember that. Eris has the number 136199.
-cvj
This is the penultimate line in an article today in the Science Times:
“Sometimes how the blood is splattered on the wall tells you more about what happened than the body,â€
It is a quote from Harold Levison of the Southwest Research Institute, in the context of understanding the origins and dynamics of our Solar System. The article is by Kenneth Chang, and a link to it is here.
It is a lovely article, focusing on the continuing series of discoveries being made about Kuiper Belt objects (e.g. Sedna, “Xena”, etc…), those cousins of Pluto that, thanks for better detection technology, have turned out to be quite numerous (click on image above… more of it at the NYT site):
More than 1,100 Kuiper Belt objects have been found so far. Astronomers estimate that half a million bodies larger than 20 miles wide are floating out there. At least one appears to be mostly rock with a coating of ice. Some are mostly ice. Some are less dense than ice, indicating a Swiss-cheese-like structure. A surprising number of them have moons.
Levison says:
“The more we learn, the weirder it looks.â€
It is quite a fascinating subject, a detective story full of wonderful science, and illustrates -as I have said earlier in the post called “Spinach Blogging”- how the “demotion of Pluto” story opens the door to so much active planetary science. It also illustrates why it it is interesting to keep an eye on the debate about the “demotion”. which is still ongoing. The nature of the Kuiper belt is teaching us a huge amount about the other bodies in the solar system. For example:
The distribution of Kuiper Belt objects has already provided decisive evidence that Neptune was once perhaps nearly a billion miles closer to the Sun and was then gravitationally nudged outward. Astronomers also hope that the Kuiper Belt preserves a frozen record of the earliest building materials of the solar system.
Another nice analogy from S. Alan Stern (of the Southwest Research Institute and Continue reading ‘Clues in the Blood Splatter Patterns’
[Updated, see below.]
You’ll recall the news I reported about a number of members of the astronomy and planetary science community asking people to sign a petition to get the IAU to reconsider their Prague decision to accept the planetary definition that resulted in the “Pluto demotion”. See this link where you can find the precise language of their objection. (HST image of Pluto and Charon on right. Click for larger.) The short statement at the header of the petition itself is:
We, as planetary scientists and astronomers, do not agree with the IAU’s definition of a planet, nor will we use it. A better definition is needed.
Well, this is an update to let you know that they have gathered all the signatures that they wanted, from members of the scientific community. The petition is now closed. I don’t know if I’m allowed to point to the website where you can see the list of signatures (I hope someone will let me know), but I can report that there are 300 signatures (after a quick count), from a truly international group, from every continent, and from pretty much every astronomy department (or other institution) that I’ve heard of. [Update: I’ve got permission from Mark Sykes, one of the proposers of this petition, to make public the website. It is here, and has the list of signatories. There is now a press release there. If you’re a member of the press, I imagine it might form the basis for an interesting story.]
Also on the website is the following:
So despite the announcement yesterday, reliable sources tell me that some members of the astronomy community are hoping that there is still maybe a small window of opportunity for Pluto.
Some members of the community are preparing a petition which protests the IAU planet definition! They don’t agree with the decision, and point out that a rather small percentage of the astronomical community actually voted at the Prague IAU. They give the following additional reasons for their questioning of the decision:
They say that the community voted….
… for a definition of ‘planet’ that uses dynamics (location) rather than intrinsic properties to decide if an object is or is not a planet. This result is counter to other classification schemes in astronomy (e.g., stars, galaxies, nebulae, even asteroids) in which dynamical context does not play a controlling role. Furthermore, it produces results that are incongruous and cannot be extended within our own solar system or to extra-solar planetary systems without producing immediate results that are patently absurd: e.g., a Neptune-sized object discovered beyond 150 AU could not be a planet, the presence of an Earth orbiting its star between a Jupiter and a Saturn would mean the Earth could not be considered a planet since it could not clear its “neighborhood”. This definition also excludes Pluto from planethood in our solar system, something that is both scientifically questionable and publicly problematic. Both Pluto and a distant Neptune would be classified as a “dwarf planet”, which is not to be considered a subcategory of “planet”.
The petition is to be among the community only, so I will not give you details about how to sign it. Also, I don’t know if I have permission to reveal the names of the people who put forward the petition, so I will not do that, at least until I know more.
This is rather unexpected and quite interesting, I hope you agree.
-cvj
I learned a new term from a producer at a television studio the other day (in a context I do not know if I’m allowed to blog about yet): “Spinach TV”. I love it. This is a term expressing the idea of television programming that is supposed to be “good for you” since it is educational in some way. Some of us are doing this sort of thing in the blogging world, for better or worse. See my about page.
With that in mind, I’d like to offer some words about this week’s science coverage of the two big Astronomy/Astrophysics stories. I’ve heard the issue raised a number of times today (including by my colleague Sean over on CV) that it is somehow to be thought of as a bad thing that there’s more coverage in the press of the Pluto demotion than there is of the new results giving new direct evidence of Dark Matter. The former is supposed to be all about the politics of science while the latter is supposed to be covered more since it is a profound new result.
With all due respect to my friends and colleagues who have expressed that opinion, I would say that such a view is somewhat short-sighted and has more than a whiff of elitism about it. They’re just missing the big picture. I completely agree that the Dark Matter result is vastly more important new science than the simple fact of Pluto’s demotion, but from the perspective of science education, the value of the Pluto coverage is immensely important, and maybe at least as important as the Dark Matter coverage. I can think of several reasons, and here are some:
So you’ll recall that when we thought we had twelve planets we started trying to think of new mnemonics to help people remember the planets’ ordering.
For example, from Yvette:
My Very Educated Mother Can’t Justify Someone Using New Planetary Conventions… oh no, they haven’t named the last one yet!!!
Or from Amara’s friend Damien Broderick:
My very eccentric mother’s cook just served us nine pastry coated xylophones
(On the assumption that the last planet would be named Xena.)
Or from astromcnaught:
My View Embraces Moving Classifications, Just Stop Uncovering New Planets Called 2003 UB313
Or from Alan Hamilton (via Robert Greenham):
Most Victorian Euphoniums Make Cats Jump Suddenly Unless Neighbours Play Calming Xylophones.
Ok… Let’s try this again shall we?
It’s official! There are eight planets in our solar system. The vote has taken place. Last week’s proposals have been rejected. Pluto has been demoted, apparently.
They were voting on the following (I got this here):
1) A planet1 is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A dwarf planet is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape2, (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects3 orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as “Small Solar System Bodies”.
1The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
2An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.
3These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.
That was resolution 5A, and then there is 5B:
Insert the word “classical” before the word “planet” in Resolution 5A, Section (1), and footnote 1. Thus reading:
(1) A classical planet1 is a celestial body . . .
And then the Pluto-specific resolutions (actually, 5B seems to lay the groundwork of the attempt to save Pluto):
RESOLUTION 6A
The IAU further resolves:Pluto is a dwarf planet by the above definition and is recognized as the prototype of a new category of trans-Neptunian objects.
RESOLUTION 6B
The following sentence is added to Resolution 6A:This category is to be called “plutonian objects.”
Anyway, from what I heard, looks like these attempts to keep it have been rejected - those last few resolutions were voted down - and Pluto has been given the chop.
More later…
[Update: BBC story on it here.]
-cvj
The saga continues. Nobody yet knows how many planets we have. There has been fierce argument at the International Astronomical Union. As a result, the definitions of last week have been revised. “Pluton” has been discarded as a term (partly because of the clash with a geological term, a clash which was also swiftly noted by one of Asymptotia’s readers), and the vote is very soon.
Pluto and all the loveable little bodies might now in trouble because a revision to the definition says that a planet must be the “dominant body” in its orbital zone, clearing out any little neighbours. New Scientist’s website reports that
Pluto does not qualify because its orbit crosses that of the vastly larger Neptune.
Quoting further:
It’s official!* There are twelve planets in our Solar System (so update all the posters, such as the ESA one on the right). [Update1…. Oh no it’s not official! See here.] [Update2: The vote is in… see here.]
Count ‘em:
In addition, you’ll have to add a new word or two to your vocabulary, such as “pluton”, of which Pluto is the prototype. From the 16th August press release of the International Astronomical Union:
16-August-2006, Prague. The world’s astronomers, under the auspices of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), have concluded two years of work defining the difference between “planets†and the smaller “solar system bodies†such as comets and asteroids. If the definition is approved by the astronomers gathered 14-25 August 2006 at the IAU General Assembly in Prague, our Solar System will include 12 planets, with more to come: eight classical planets that dominate the system, three planets in a new and growing category of “plutons†– Pluto-like objects – and Ceres. Pluto remains a planet and is the prototype for the new category of “plutons.â€
-cvj
(Thanks Amara!)
(*almost official. It has to be approved, it says.)
