Why are we still talking about Pluto?
To be clear, Pluto is not the main focus of the teams petition.
So this property can be included in the definition of planet.
Pluto as seen by New Horizons© NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
How does the proposed definition of planet differ from the existing definition?
Thats why the team put an upper bound on mass in their definition of a planet.
And in case youre wondering, Plutoweighsapproximately 2.891022(1.311022kg).
An illustration of different types of exoplanet, or planets outside our solar system. © NASA/JPL-Caltech
This is a weakness of the current definition.
But if the team is successful, the thousands of worlds we call exoplanets may simply be called planets.
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