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Will Pluto become a planet again?Credit: NASA\/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory\/Southwest Research Institute<\/p>\n
Many of us are old enough to have grown up with nine planets orbiting the Sun. In 2006, however, a controversial decision within the astronomy community resulted in the official list being cut to eight, removing Pluto<\/a>.<\/p>\n On Tuesday, responding to a question during a testimony to a US Senate committee, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he was firmly on the side of restoring Pluto\u2019s lost planetary status, and that the agency was \u201cworking on some papers right now to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this\u201d. It is unclear what papers Isaacman was referring to; NASA did not respond to a request for clarification.<\/p>\n Isaacman\u2019s remark triggered debate among researchers with some backing the proposal and others being forcefully against it. \u201cThe question of whether or not we should call Pluto a planet distracts from the real scientific issues,\u201d says Amanda Hendrix, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.<\/p>\n What has riled some astronomers was that Isaacman\u2019s remark came at the end of a testimony in which he endorsed the United States Administration\u2019s proposal to halve NASA\u2019s science budget. Together with cuts at the National Science Foundation<\/a>, many astronomers feel that their field is under siege. \u201cIt’s wild to \u2018make Pluto a planet again\u2019 while decimating the careers of those of us that study it,\u201d planetary scientist Adeene Denton wrote on BlueSky<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Pluto probe offers eye-popping view of neighbouring star Proxima Centauri<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n David Grinspoon, an astrobiologist in at the Planetary Science Institute in Washington DC, was among those who had originally opposed to Pluto being demoted, and he still is. He says that there is still \u201ca genuine debate\u201d on this controversy and favours reopening the discussion.<\/p>\n However, he adds that NASA weighing in on the subject could be counterproductive because it\u2019s a decision that should be taken at the international level. The real authority on what counts as a planet lies with the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the body that establishes official astronomical terminology.<\/p>\n \u201cEven though I would like to ultimately see a better definition widely agreed upon, you can\u2019t have NASA declare this,\u201d says Grinspoon.<\/p>\n Distracting debate<\/p>\n The original rationale for reclassifying Pluto was the discovery of other, similarly sized bodies in the Solar System. Some, like Eris<\/a>, discovered in 2004, are more massive than Pluto and would deserve to be called planets at least as much as Pluto does. By some estimates, there could be hundreds or even thousands<\/a> of Pluto-sized objects in the Solar System, although in many cases their properties are poorly known.<\/p>\n