Science News

Update 8/25/06: A group of Pluto supporters have decided to sue the IAU for violating the Administrative Procedure Act when it decided to demote Pluto to dwarf planet status. I can’t imagine this will make it very far in the court system… but what do I know?
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Today, astronomers voted to demote Pluto of its planet status after 76 years of equal status with the Big 8… can you imagine how many books and model solar system toys now have to be reproduced? Read the rest

Update 8/24: The news is official. Neither Xena nor Pluto are planets.
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When Xena (UB313) was found in July 2005 by Caltech’s Mike Brown and colleagues, it changed the way astronomers thought about what planets are. Next week, the International Astronomical Union will clarify the definition of a planet and either upgrade Xena to planet status or downgrade Pluto to just another object in the Kuiper Belt. It’s also possible that the asteroid Ceres and Pluto’s moon Charon will become planets. Read the rest

Our unofficial 10th planet Xena is unvealing itself in mysterious ways. New Hubble Space Telescope images released this week show that Xena's smaller than originally thought - with a diameter of 2384 km, or about 5% larger than Pluto. Read the rest

Astronomy has come a long way since 1995. Since then, we've discvered two more planets - Sedna (discovered in 2004), which is slightly smaller than Pluto, and Xena (discovered in 2005), slightly larger than Pluto - and have detected planets revolving around another star like our sun. Before that, we only knew of planets that revolved around our own sun. Discover Magazine asks So why isn't anyone excited?. Perhaps because no one's ever seen those planets, it answers. Read the rest

One of the more fascinating books I’m currently reading is Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. It’s actually light reading for a theoretical physics book, meaning that he doesn’t lose you at any point, nor does he bore/frustrate his readers with lots of obscure math, so thus far, I’m happy with it. Read the rest

A group of amateur astronomists were the first to see our tenth planet Xena through conventional means - through a telescope. Read the rest