What is a planet?

Most people know what a planet is. That is the list of nine rocky or gassy or icy bodies in the sky that are generally anthologized as planets. This is the list that people learned in elementary school.

Over history, the list of planets has changed. The original definition of planets was wanderer or objects in the sky that moved differently than the stars. The sun was a planet. The moon was a planet. As our list of objects grew, other objects became planets. Eventually we decided that any object that was round and as big as the moon (sorry Ceres) that was not a star and not orbiting another planet was a planet.

However, once we  built telescopes that could see beyond Pluto, things changed. There are a whole lot of Icy bodies that resemble Pluto. Our list of planets became unwieldy.  So we changed our definition of planet to exclude Pluto and all its cousins beyond the orbit of Pluto

In order to properly classify planets, we should look at a lot more planets. Thanks to modern observations of other stars, we no know of over four thousand planets orbiting other stars (exoplanets). Interesting thing is that our methods of observing exoplanets favors giant exoplanets orbiting painfully close to their star.

My Plan

1) Develop an unbiased method of surveying a large group of other stars for planets

2) Select a group of at least a thousand typical stars 

3) Survey their solar system down to their smaller planets and larger moons

4) Develop a more rational classification system for solar systems based on this group of surveyed solar systems

5) Use our new system to classify our solar system 

6) Demote the term "planet" to a quaint old fashioned term reserved for grade school

7) Stop arguing with nostalgic people about what is a planet