Earlier quoted context omitted.
We should add those planets to the official list too. Gauss considered Ceres to be a planet and I believe him over living astronomers. The motivation for this dwarf planet nonsense was to try to keep the official planet list small so children could memorize them with ease, but that is absurd. We do not remove countries from the map to make it easier for children to learn geography and there are over 100 of them.
For a generation, schoolchildren everywhere memorized the names of the 12 planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Ceres, Pallas, Vesta, Juno, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. The list was stable at 12 for about 40 years, but started growing again in the middle of the century. By 1868 there were 100 named asteroids. Not a single one has people living on it, so making children memorize their names was seen as a wast…
Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart
#261Can anyone justify why children should be required to learn about anything outside of our atmosphere beyond the sun and moon at school? It is trivia with no practical applications. It is not logical to design classification schemes for ultimately useless knowledge based on the learning ability of children.