Setting aside the whole "demote Pluto" and "dwarf planet" aspects, I find it amusing that we use the same term for small rocky Mercury (2,440 km radius, 5% of Earth's mass) and immense gaseous Jupiter (69,000 km radius, over 300 times Earth's mass). Only we don't, of course. Jupiter is a gas giant, while Mercury is a rocky planet, or iron planet; there's a lot of 'planet' terminology.
replyIt gets even weird when you consider Ganymede which is larger than mercury but not a planet because it's a moon.
replyUltimately these sorts of quibbles are fundamentally semantic in nature thus (in general) entirely pointless. It's only the subjects themselves - the myriad celestial bodies - that are interesting.
replyIt's semantics as well as a collision with our inability to work with gradients. We can look at two colours and can name the discrete ones - but when does red stop being red? When does a species emerge?
reply