Question: is it true that plodo is teicnatly a plantet because it is to small

Ciarán O'Brien answered on 17 Nov 2014:

Yeah, we used to call Pluto a planet, but it wasn’t really fair. Pluto is actually really tiny, and if Pluto was a planet, then we’d have to call loads of other things floating about in the solar system a planet too, like a bunch of asteroids in the asteroid field between Mars and Jupiter, or the occasional comet that passes through.

Before 2006, there wasn’t actually a proper scientific definition for the word “planet”. In science you have to be careful that you use the right definitions of a word, it’s very important to avoid confusion. So in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to fix this and define a planet as an object that:

1- Must orbit the sun (Pluto does that)
2- Is massive enough that its own gravity makes it sphere-shaped (Pluto juuuuust about does that)
3- Has cleared any other objects out of its orbit (Pluto can’t do that, it’s just too small)

All the other 8 planets meet those rules, but 97% of the objects in Pluto’s orbit are something besides Pluto!

And so they created the term “dwarf planet” for Pluto. There are a handful of people who disagree with the change, but most scientists agree with it as it makes far more sense than what we had before.