Thursday, August 24, 2006

New Planet Definition Enlarges Solar System

Being a planet used to be an old boys club with 8 or 9 members. It ain't so anymore.

The new proposed definition of a planet is: a celestial body with sufficient mass to assume a nearly spherical shape that orbits a star without being another star or a satellite of another planet. By this definition, the list of planets in order from the sun now reads: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto-Charon (considered a double-planet system) and the newly discovered and officially unnamed 2003 UB313, otherwise known as Xena

Science & Technology at Scientific American.com: New Planet Definition Enlarges Solar System

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