Word: iau
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...support their ETF was going to move the market." Interest-rate jitters and overheated speculation led to declining prices for most commodities beginning in May, however, and by the end of June, SLV was trading close to its lowest levels. Barclays downplays any notion that SLV, its gold fund IAU or, for that matter, any of its 184 other ETFs might have tilted global indexes. "ETFs as a whole represent about 5% of total mutual-fund assets, so they're not going to drive markets," says Barclays' Kranefuss...
...there. What do you call all the other planetlike objects that have lately been discovered orbiting around our sun, tiny worlds with names like Sedna, Quaoar and 2004 DW? Part of the problem is that there is no precise scientific definition of the word planet. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) is trying to hammer one out, but the decision is proving more difficult than anyone thought. An apparent consensus, reached just weeks ago, seems to have fallen apart. "The current state," admits Brian Marsden, director of the IAU's Minor Planet Center at Harvard, "is rather confusing...
...about 2,000 km (1,250 miles) in diameter, which would let Pluto remain a planet and make 2003 UB313 one as well, but keep the rest of the riffraff out. "Pluto," says Alan Boss, an astronomer at the Carnegie Institution of Washington and a member of the IAU working group, "has historically been considered a planet, and so any definition we adopt really must include it." Another proposal would drop the limit to 1,000 km, letting Quaoar and Sedna into the club as well...
There's no telling when the IAU might make a decision. It could be as early as the end of this month. But it can't wait forever; Brown and Trujillo have even more discoveries waiting in the pipeline (they've put their logs behind a firewall to keep prying competitors away) and they're not done yet. Just about all the new worlds have been found by looking even farther outside the plane of the solar system than Pluto's orbit. "Nobody really expected to see anything way up there," says Brown. "But based on what we've found...
...some make no apparent sense at all. Craters on the asteroid Gaspra are named in honor of natural springs (Saratoga, Baden-Baden), and those on the dark asteroid Mathilde honor--no kidding--major coal seams, such as the Lorraine in France. Given this list of increasingly wacky categories, the IAU may want to consider one more honoree when it meets to ratify names three years from now: Alex Trebek, host of TV's Jeopardy! --By Michael D. Lemonick/New York