By Jeanna Bryner, SPACE.com Top astronomers and other planetary
scientists will step into the ring this month to duke it out
over a basic, yet controversial, question: What is a planet?
"The Great Planet Debate: Science as Process" conference will be
held from Aug. 14-16 at the Johns Hopkins University Applied
Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Md. Some astronomers see the
conference as a way of cleaning up the mess created by the
organization that names celestial bodies, the International
Astronomical Union (IAU), which in August 2006 voted in a new
definition of planet that demoted Pluto to "dwarf planet."
(Under a more recent IAU decision, Pluto and similar objects are
classified as "plutoids.") Many planet scientists were
disgruntled over the 2006 IAU decision, which they said involved
a vote of just 424 astronomers out of some 10,000 professional
astronomers around the globe. The most recent decision, to
categorize Pluto and such as plutoids, further ticked off many
astronomers, who felt the term was de