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...July, Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, made an announcement that took the debate to a whole new plane. Along with his colleague Chad Trujillo, Brown had found something very much like Pluto, only bigger, and last month he declared that the object known officially as 2003 UB313--and temporarily nicknamed Xena--has its own little moon. Suddenly, the question Tyson had raised to make a provocative educational point became something much larger: if Pluto is a planet, then Brown's new object must be one as well...
...astronomers trained their telescopes on the Kuiper Belt 15 years ago, they started finding all sorts of objects. In the past few years, Brown and Trujillo have been turning up some pretty big ones, including Quaoar (about half the size of Pluto) in 2002 and Sedna (probably a bit bigger than that...
...another idea, favored by Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., would open the door even wider. By his definition, any object massive enough for gravity to squeeze into a spherical shape is a planet--unless the object orbits a bigger planet, of course. Otherwise, dozens of moons would have to be reclassified as planets. "Defining planets by size is purely arbitrary," agrees Marsden, who likes Stern's idea. "The Pluto-crats want to cut things off there, but it's absurd to say that an object 2,000 km across is a planet...
...roundness rule would add lots of planets to the solar system in one fell swoop: not just Sedna, Quaoar and 2003 UB313 but also two more icy worlds spotted by Brown and Trujillo--2004 DW, a little bigger than Quaoar, and 2003 EL61, probably about seven-tenths the size of Pluto. The latter made headlines when it was formally announced to the world by Spanish astronomers who, according to Brown, knew where to look because they had used the Internet to tap into his telescope logs (the Spaniards deny the charge). At least five or six asteroids would also qualify...
Rupture zone When plates moving past each other get stuck, pressure builds until it's eventually released in an earthquake. The greater the pressure, the bigger the quake