That sound you hear is the breaking of thousands (perhaps millions) of hearts of astronomers and science fiction fans across the world…
Pluto demoted under new definition of planet
Last Updated: Thursday, August 24, 2006 | 2:33 PM ET
Little Pluto, formerly the solar system’s smallest planet, has been stripped of its status by the International Astronomical Union, reducing the number of planets to eight.
The new guidelines — introduced in Prague on Thursday after a week of debate by the 2,500 astronomers at the organization’s conference — define what is a planet and what is not. Pluto didn’t make the cut.
Pluto, which is smaller than Earth’s moon, doesn’t fit the new criteria for a planet: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.”
There are now only EIGHT planets in our solar system. Pluto is out…relegated to a piffling, unloved category of dwarf planets, along with several other Kuiper Belt objects.
Millions of school kids will be disillusioned…
Text books will have to be re-written…
NASA will be forced to admit that it has sent the New Horizons probe to investigate the planet that isn’t…just another mid-sized, icy rock, at the leading edge of other big, icy rocks…
And what happens to the 1977 Doctor Who big business satire, The Sun Makers — which is set on a futuristic, industrialized Pluto? Will it have the same flavour, now that it’s set on a mini-planet, and not the real thing?
These are the important questions of our time! 
A great pity…here I was, hoping for the official christening of our tenth planet as Xena…
