20 Years Later: Pluto Is Still A Planet, and the IAU Is Still Wrong

One of the many pro-Pluto websites that sprang up in the immediate aftermath of the disastrous IAU planet definition vote back in 2006 featured the image of a counter depicting Pluto’s time taken away since the vote. That counter updated itself every day, updating the days, months, and eventually years since the travesty. That website has long since gone down—though various others remain—but many are still counting Pluto’s time taken away in terms of planetary recognition. For those of us doing this, today is an especially difficult anniversary, one we long hoped we would never see. Twenty years. Two decades of a very flawed, very biased planet definition wrongly portrayed by many in the mainstream media as the final answer it most certainly never was. Two decades of sloppy reporting that completely obscured the reality of the ongoing debate over planet definition, feeding the public a one-sided view that is more politics than science. This should never have gone on for so long. The…