Hi All

Perhaps we should ask ourselves what "planet" means - historically speaking it meant "wanderer" and the Ancients meant the few they could see. Technically the "planets" invisible to the naked eye don't count as "wanderers", but of course we've accepted that telescopes show us far more than we could see. Now the telescopes are showing us even more and the objects are out-numbering our expectations - if Alan Stern is right there will be dozens of these things with Sedna, Pluto and Xena being just the first few.

To not call them "planets" in deference to models of gas giant formation as some advocate begs the question - what would we call Mars or Earth-sized scattered disk objects? What would call them if they'd been scattered in a different solar system as a "Hot Jupiter" migrated inwards to its star?

If we can call the Inner Planets "terrestrials" - hardly a fair comparison there - and we call Jupiter thru Neptune "Gas Giants", tho some would divide them into "Gas" and "Ice Giants", then why not "Ice Dwarfs" for the frozen worlds at the very fringe of SolSpace?

Adam