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The good news about demoting Pluto is that I can now show all the planets to the students in my Astronomy classes on our 16 inch telescope. Pluto is hard to find and is hard to tell it's a planet in our scope. I have now rewritten the solar system mnemonic as "My Very Educated Mother Just Showed...

hi Ashley, your question brings up a great point, which is that one of the things scientists do is to look at the many things in the universe and figure out which ones are like the others, and which ones are not. In many ways, that is the start to figuring out the underlying causes for the phenomenon...

Hi Ashley, I don't think Pluto will be reinstated as a planet anytime soon. Having "moons" is not a sufficient condition for a solar system object to be classified as a planet under the current definition of a planet used by astronomers and space scientists. Many asteroids in our solar...

Hi Lisa, I don't believe that Pluto will be reinstated as a planet anytime soon. Having "moons" is not a sufficient condition for a solar system object to be classified as a planet under the current definition of a planet used by astronomers and space scientists. Many asteroids in our solar...

Hi Sylvia, The number of moons doesn’t change the new status of Pluto as a dwarf planet. International Astronomical Union (IAU) set the new definition for a planet in 2006 (you can more e.g from http://astroversity.blogspot.com/2007/07/explained-why-pluto-is-not-planet.html ). Pluto fails the requirement...

Becky S (Fox) I know about the pluto debate, and its now a minor planet, but since hubble has discovered that pluto has three moons instead of just one, couldn't there be a really good argument about putting pluto back into "full" planet status?