Pluto demoted

[Steph Cowley]

carpo said:

To be fair also, describing it as 'absurd' that only a certain section of memebership can vote, I'm sure that there is a perfectly good reason why those people are entitled to vote and why others are not.

Nope, there isn't. They waited until the last day of the IAU meeting to vote, not many astronomers are still there the last day (and they know this.) However they wouldn't do anything fair like give a ballot card to every astronomer there before they left, even though they knew they were going to have this vote. For something so important that so many astronomers have a view on they should have made more of an effort to get more people voting.
They could easily set up a way of voting on the IAU website, of which only professional scientists who have produced research relevant to astronomy can become members.

carpo said:

To describe an organisations internal procedures as 'absurd' because you disagree with a particular decision is just wrong IMO. If it had been the other way around I'm sure that you would be praising it (or that we wouldn't be having this discussion at all)

I wouldn't be praising it, I would be happier, but I still wouldn't praise it.
To leave 95% of astronomers out of the vote was not a good thing. It's like leaving 95% of USA's population out of the presidential elections because they don't go to Washington DC to vote. That just wouldn't happen.

[Carpo]

It's not the IAU's fault people went home earlier, the fact they wern't there means they obviously weren't interested in the decision one way or the other.

[Steph Cowley]

carpo said:

It's not the IAU's fault people went home earlier, the fact they wern't there means they obviously weren't interested in the decision one way or the other.

Not necessarily. It might mean that they couldn't stay for the whole time because they had other plans.

For a decision so big, they should have made sure that more people were voting. And they could've done that easily.

The way the IAU did the vote was not good, and the definition, that less than 3% of the world's astronomers voted for, cannot be taken seriously.

[covunistudent]

Argh but of course just because Pluto was a planet doesn't mean there have to be over 400 planets.

They could just say well first come first served, might not be correct science, but just think of millions of children that will go to the next space museum to not see Pluto as a planet, but have being growing up learning it.