Pluto Redux

I suppose I'm feeding into the overblown frenzy, but since I love astronomy, why not?

Officially Pluto has been demoted to a new class of bodies called "dwarf planets". Yet, they are not planets. Confusing, isn't it? Either it is a planet or it isn't. If it isn't then why does its name include the word planet?

The International Astronomical Union at their meeting in Prague finally came to a decision to name 3 basic groups of bodies in the solar system; 1) Planets: The eight worlds from Mercury to Neptune. 2) Dwarf Planets: Pluto and any other round object that "has not cleared the neighborhood around its orbit, and is not a satellite." 3) Small Solar System Bodies: All other objects orbiting the Sun.

& of course rather than settling things it has created more controversy. Part of it has to do with how you decide that a planet is a planet. To be a planet it has to be found that it "has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." Yet, following that definition you couldn't call Jupiter a planet since it has about 50,000 trojan asteroids. & Earth isn't any better. So many scientists are already petitioning for a revisit, esp since only 424 astronomers voted on the final resolution.

What do I think about all the to do? 1st of all, much as I hate to see Pluto taken out of the list of planets I go back to what I said in a previous blog, there needs to be a class of dwarf planets. Put Pluto, Ceres, & 2003 UB313 into a class called dwarf planets. Some argue that there will be many more yet to be found. So we can't call them planets. Why not, with the qualifier of dwarf they fit the general description of a planet that most of us use. They orbit the sun, they are round, they usually have moons but not always. All that is needed is a minimum & maximum size. The 2nd class would be the terrestrial planets. The 3rd would be the gas giants with a definition of where they end & brown dwarfs begin. A 4th class would be moons. Finally a 5th general class that would have subclasses such as asteroids & comets.

I know this won't please everyone. But, it strikes me as the most logical way to deal with things. The Solar System, or for that matter, creation in general is not as neat & simple as some people would like. It is a complex system that shows the handiwork of an intelligent designer. & to put it bluntly, it shows that creation did not spring up by chance. As Genesis puts it: "In the beginning God created the heavens & the Earth". I suspect that somewhere down the road another type of body will be found that won't fit into any of the current types. They keep finding smaller & smaller subatomic particles after they say they have gone as far as they can. The same is probably true on the macro-scale of things as it is on the micro-scale. The more that scientists discover about creation, in the end the more we discovery the glory of God revealed in His creation.