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To: cripplecreek
In my opinion it will always be 9.

Always? I have seen (old) college textbooks that have Ceres, Pallas, Juno, and Vesta listed as planets. The number of planets has fluctuated with time and science. It won't be the first time that planets have been added or removed from the list. Are you saying that if you had been born a little earlier, you would still be asserting that there were only 8 or 11 planets?

40 posted on 08/15/2006 9:27:07 PM PDT by tortoise
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To: tortoise

This isn't about anything other than tinkering with definitions, with no new information involved. If they had learned that some planets have newly-discovered characteristic X, or were formed by process Y, then that would be one way to define the term "planet." But my impression of what's going on is that they're playing word games.


42 posted on 08/16/2006 4:12:07 AM PDT by PatrickHenry (Everything is blasphemy to somebody.)
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