Could Pluto Regain Its Planethood?

By Mike Wall

Advocates of Pluto’s planethood are about to fire another salvo in the decade-long debate about the famous object’s status.

Scientists on NASA’s New Horizons mission, which performed the first-ever flyby of Pluto in July 2015, will officially propose a new definition of “planet” next month, at the 48th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in The Woodlands, Texas.

The new definition would replace, or supersede, the one devised by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in 2006. A planet, the IAU determined, is a body that orbits the sun without being the moon of another object; is large enough that its own gravity has rounded it into a sphere (but not so large that it undergoes fusion reactions, like a star); and has “cleared its neighborhood” of most other bodies.

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