"I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter: to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you have lived at all"    Leo Rosten
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    Thursday, August 24, 2006

    Planets Revised

    So for those of you that care. My previous post was the new 'proposal' put out at the convention. However today at the vote it got voted down. As such Pluto is no longer a 'classical' planet, our we now only have 8 planets. Here is the new defintion.

    For now, membership will be restricted to the eight "classical" planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

    Much-maligned Pluto doesn't make the grade under the new rules for a planet: "a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

    Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.

    Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of "dwarf planets," similar to what long have been termed "minor planets." The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun -- "small solar system bodies," a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.
    http://articles.news.aol.com/news/

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