In the ancient Greek world, and the dark age one, there were five classes of objects in the universe. They were the Earth, the moon, the planets, the sun, and the stars. And there were five planets. Things like comets and meteors were pretty much temporary things appearing only as signs—basically the gods sending coded messages for any who could interpret them. “Planet” meant an entirely different thing then as now. It wasn’t until the 16h century that the idea of Earth being just another planet began to take hold.
I see the point being that govt funded perfessers are hell bent on redefining the term “Planet”. It seems like a lame operation to generate papers to use to milk the NSF, et. al. for funding instead of doing legitimate work.
Graduate students are not being well trained/well served by such unscientific actions.