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There are not three new planets. It was speculated that there would be a new definition of planets that would result in three new planets being added to the solar system, but instead, a new definition was approved that actually took away a planet! Pluto, the ninth planet, is no longer officially considered to be a planet.

2006-09-01 23:51:04 · answer #1 · answered by Anonymous · 1 0

Three weeks ago the International Astronomical Union (IAU) proposed promoting 3 objects in our Solar System to planet status, but this proposal was replaced a week later and instead they decided to take pluto out of the planet category, so now officially our Solar System has 8 planets; Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

Those 3 objects were Ceres, the largest asteroid (discovered in 1801); 2003 UB313 (nicknamed Xena), an object just slightly bigger than Pluto and much farther away from the Sun than Pluto is, discovered in 2003 and yet to be given an official name; and Charon, Pluto's largest moon, discovered in 1978. So you see these objects aren't new, we've known about them for some time. If you want photos, just search the web. But I should warn you that we don't have any good images of Charon or 2003 UB313 yet, they are so far away! I don't think we have any good images of Ceres, either, since no spacecraft has ever visited it.

2006-09-02 12:48:11 · answer #2 · answered by kris 6 · 0 0

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