Includes pluto
Ignores Eris and Ceres.
this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2026
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Pluto is a dwarf planet. "Planet" is right there in the name, so yes, it's literally a planet.
Ceres is also a planet. You'll be including that one too, right?
Planet is in the name, but it's there in the same way "democratic" is in the name of various dictatorships, or "socialist" is in the term "Nazi".
A dwarf planet is not a type of planet. "Dwarf Planet" is its own category of solar system object, not a subtype. It's the same way that comets and asteroids are "minor planets".
If you want Pluto to be a planet with no modifier adjective, you can't then just have the nine that were taught in schools for decades as "the planets of the Solar system", because we've discovered several out there beyond Neptune that qualify in the same way that Pluto does.
Most pro-Pluto arguments boil down to "there are nine because I was taught nine and nothing will ever change that (but maybe I could be convinced to allow one extra one at the end because the newspapers love a good planet X story)".
The mnemonics, whatever they'd be (or become) would need to account for the letters MVEMCJSUNOPSHQMGES and there would be the expectation that it could change at any minute if something new is discovered due to the rate of progress that simply didn't exist when the nine were set in stone.
And most arguments against Ceres being in the list would rule out Pluto for the same reason (and there's at least one that would qualify Ceres and not Pluto - orbiting along the ecliptic.)
I think they prefer to be called "little planets" now.
We stan Ceres rights in this spaceship. Beltalowda!
The easier term to use is "planette"
This would imply that planet is the masculine form and both mean "small plan"
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There are nine planets!
If you count dwarf planets, that puts our count at 13.
And we can't do 13 planets. It's unlucky.
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Funny that the robot is from NASA - NASA didn't make the decision to declassify Pluto as a planet, and probably doesn't GAF. This was decided in 2006 by the International Astronomers Union at the end of the last day of their 2-week conference. The vote was taken after more than 80% of the 2500 attendees had already left.
Yeah but I used to know one of the astronomers who voted to demote Pluto. Pluto had it coming. Either it got demoted or a lot of other stuff got promoted. And demoting Pluto makes it a more useful category.
It really doesn't. It just makes it easier to make planetary system models that people can claim match the solar system.
The current classification is like saying whales are fish because they live in the ocean, and it's better this way because we would have to rethink what "mammal" means.
You love minor planets? Name all of them! There's just like 10 of them, go ahead.
Why is there an implication that we need to be able to name every planetary body in our system?
What? Can you not name every mammal? Ever fish? No category is worthwhile if the average grade schooler cannot name every member of it!
My fav top 2...
Gary, Larry, Barry, Harry, Mary, Perry, Kerry, Terry Teri and Pterry (the triplets)
This is what they took from us 
Pluto stole the attention back, not by name, but by best known of its class. Still the king.
However, Eris is more massive...
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(Actual colors not as depicted.)
Why are the colours different?
Cameras.
as a human you (most likely) have 3 types of photo receptors. Green, blue and red. That's why digital pictures mostly use RGB to save color data. They save how much red light, how much green light and his much blue light each pixel should have. For this reason the sensors of digital cameras use the same pixels , just for capturing light instead. So the camera only captures Red,blue and green light from the visible spectrum and discards all else because we as humans can't see that other light. But for scientific cameras, what the scientists look for might not be visible RGB light. So often the cameras capture ultraviolet light or other wavelengths instead. To display the image they have to shift the colors, because a) you can't see ultraviolet light and b) your screen can't display ultra violet light either. So they just transform to the RGB color space. What is blue in the image now is not blue in real live but actually ultraviolet. What is red is not red in real live but actually a different wavelength you can't see.
This is true for basically all space images with long range telescopes like Hubble or James Webb. And for most satellites.
Interesting, thanks for the explanation
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That was a friendly neighborhood OPA representative to talk about why Ceres should also be included
Remember the Cant!!!
ALWAYS HAS BEEN
I remember looking at an astronomy book at school and seeing Pluto's weird ass slanted orbit and thinking that it shouldn't be counted amongst the others. Felt really vindicated when Jim Carrey's kids in Me, Myself and Irene argued about Pluto not being a planet. The official definition was just cleanup.
If you're counting Pluto then you also need to count Ceres, Eris, and Sedna.
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I imagine nasa would be perfectly fine with Pluto still categorized as a planet. It was just a handful of people at a IAU conference(many had left by the time the vote happened) that made the change.
Historically it's fine. Technically it's not. The thing is, it's still a type of planet, it's not like it's now called something completely different. It's more specific to fall in line with the likely many, many neighbors that are out there.
I would completely agree with you except IAU specifically said Pluto is a dwarf planet and that, for some reason, a "dwarf planet" is NOT a sub category of planet. It's its own thing and not a planet.
It was a weird conference and a weird vote.
Edit: "planet" IMHO is more of a traditional category like constellation. Some how a tiny rock like mercury is more like Jupiter than the tiny rock Pluto. It doesn't make much scientific senseso it seems more traditional. It would be like removing the name for a constellation because one of the stars is really a bright nebula or something.
It was a weird conference and a weird vote.
Nah, the other option was to add a bunch of planets, including Ceres right between Mars and Jupiter. If you wanted to keep things as close to what they were before, removing Pluto was the more conservative option.
Who said the goal was to keep things as they were?
There's no reason not to add Ceres, or even the Moon, really.
There could be many options. My favorite is a reclassification. Terrestrial planets(first 4), gas planets (next 4) and drwarf planets (numerous). Though mercury could fit into the dwarf planet category which is fine with me. The current classification was made specifically to demote pluto with rules that particularly apply to it so that mercury would not fit into it. It was to keep the "planet" category special and to not have too many(keep it traditional). Seems a bit geocentric and less scientific.
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Yes, the vote was held at the end of the final day of the two-week IAU conference, when fewer than 500 of the 2500 attendees were still there. This scheduling was almost certainly a deliberate move to take advantage of the predictably low number of members who would still be present.
I can buy that but it leads to an interesting question..
If it was deliberate, why? To what purpose? Is there a cabal or cult or even one thought leader who was on the committee that had strong enough opinions on this, enough to scheme.
Maybe a kid who, in school, got a question wrong about Pluto and was made fun of. Looked it up afterwards, rationalized his answer instead of accepting they were wrong in forgetting, Vowed to get revenge. Studied and progressed to get on the committee and slowly over the years, schemed to engineer this. I hope they slept soundly that night.
To what purpose? To get the outcome they wanted. If they personally knew a lot of people who favored declassifying Pluto as a planet, and could encourage them to stay until the very end - maybe schedule a great party that night, I dunno. They could also make a point of shmoozing attendees who had rooms until the last night, spreading talking points. I mean if congresspeople use this tactic, why not astronomers?
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