Quote Originally Posted by halfeye View Post
I personally don't care much about Pluto, or the rest of the big bodies, what winds me up good and proper is that in their haste to make Pluto not-a-planet, they rushed into a very silly definition of planet.

As somebody said (earlier in this thread?) we should have a definition for orbits, a definition for masses, and a definition for composition. Pluto might well fail the mass one, if we had it, but we don't so it doesn't. For the composition one, Pluto might well be a gas object, except that it's too small and cold.

Running the orbital definition without the others just doesn't make sense. The only thing that could clear an orbit in the Oort is a star, which would put the system barycentre well outside the sun, possibly outside the orbit of Pluto, depending on the orbit and mass of the star.
Hyperbolic much? The definition wasn't made in haste, nor was it done solely to make Pluto not a Planet. Nor does the Oort Cloud have anything to do with the orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt inwards. And literally everything in the Solar System is going to have a barycenter closer to the sun than the object orbiting the sun; that's what orbiting the Sun means.