A group of astronomers want to change the definition of a planet. Their new proposed definition wouldn’t bring Pluto back into the planetary fold, but it could reclassify thousands of celestial bodies across the universe. From a report:
The International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) current definition of a planet, established in 2006, includes only celestial bodies that are nearly round, are gravitationally dominant and orbit our Sun. This Sun-centric definition excludes all of the bodies we’ve discovered outside our solar system, even if they may fit all other parameters. They are instead considered exoplanets. Those behind the new proposal critiqued the IAU’s definition in an upcoming paper in the Planetary Science Journal, arguing it’s vague, not quantitative and unnecessarily exclusionary.
Their new proposal would instead classify planets based on their mass, considering a planet to be any celestial body that:
- orbits one or more stars, brown dwarfs or stellar remnants and,
- is more massive than 10ÂÂ kilograms (kg) and,
- is less massive than 13 Jupiter masses (2.5 X 10^28Âkg).
What about Pluto and Charon? Their barycenter is outside Pluto.
I propose binary (and more generally n-ary) planets.