Naw. Everybody knows it’s Rupert.
MALKAV: Ooo! Ooo! We’re ALL … aliens! Yeah! From the planet … Yuggoth!
Why “Quaoar”? I have nothing against ancient American Indian mythology, but all the other planets (if planet is what it turns out to be) have been named after Roman Gods - why make this one different (and relatively unpronounceable)? There are lots to choose from. I favour Terminus, though of course they might find another one further out. On second thoughts, scratch that idea.
I think astronomers should do away with the term planet altogether and deal with bodies orbiting stars like they deal with stars and galaxies. Give it a letter, an R for rocky body, a G for gasseous body or an I for icy body. And then give it a number depending on how large it is. Let them range from 0 to 9. So Earth might be an R4. Jupiter a G8 and Pluto an I1. Quaoar would be an I0 and Ceres would be an R0.
Anyhoo that has been my thoughts on the subject of planets fo the last 6 years.
Is there any chance the spaceprobe to Pluto might be able to snag a look at this baby? They look pretty close together.
P.S. Wow, that is one long URL.
Nah-uh, because that definition coupled with your addendum would mean Mercury, Venus, Earth, etc. are now moons, since they orbit the “planet” Sun. 
Well, why do they need that “indirectly” at all? What planet, in the normal sense of the term, only indirectly something undergoing fusion?
orbits, of course…indirectly orbits.
:smack:
[Inside Joke] We didn’t land on the moon! The moon landed on us! Do you have any idea how long it takes to get gouda out of your hair?[inside joke]
Re-Arakis
There already is an Arakis. It’s a star.
RE-Charon
I get the reference but have never heard of the object in question. Can you provide more info?
Re-Tenth Planet In General
I’d be bored if a 10th planet was simply farther away than the rest. I want a 10th planet whose orbit is perpendicular to the rest. Or a Gor, or AutoCthonia whose orbit is identical to Earth’s, but on the opposite side of the sun.
Charon is Pluto’s moon. http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanets/pluto.html
I wasn’t aware we had lost any planets. And I thought the next one was supposed to be named Goofy!
Good point. I also wondered about how they would define what “spherical” is. Exactly how lumpy can it be without losing planet-status? It ends up as another arbitrary call.
I imagine someday (and likely not until we know a lot more about extrasolar planets than we do now) that there could be a classification system similar to the H-R diagram for stars. It could include everything from dust to comets to gas giants. Just don’t ask me to figure out how the scheme works
Spiratu, the idea of “indirectly orbiting*” the star was meant to include moons. The reason they did this was because in theory, due to gravitational interactions, a smaller planet could get captured by a bigger one and suddenly become a moon. Or a moon could escape a planets gravity, start orbiting the star, and become a planet. To avoid the possibility of objects changing classifications over time, they chose to lump both moons and planets in the same category.
*my words, not necessarily S&T’s
What’s that from?
Well, if Disney gets a say in the process…
From Fight club:
Narrator: When deep space exploration ramps up, it will be the corporations that name everything. The IBM Stellar Sphere. The Philip-Morris Galaxy. Planet Starbucks.
Makes me glad it got the wierd name it did.