>>7509252No big deal.
He gave a talk at the Newark Museum and I was one of the people who came up and asked questions afterwards..
The "demotion" of Pluto was a farce. Most of the planetary astronomers and virtually all the Americans had already left the meeting (to catch flights home) when a surprise vote was called without prior discussion.
Pluto meets all criteria (like roundness) except "it hasn't cleared its orbit". That's a matter of placement and not a characteristic of the body itself.
Remember the comets which whacked Jupiter? It hasn't "cleared its orbit" so it shouldn't be a planet either by that definition.
"Too many to remember" isn't an argument either. Thousands of exoplanets now and we know less about them. If we didn't want to tax schoolchildren's minds, the US should have stopped at 13 states.
