AKIPRESS.COM - In 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) stripped Pluto of its status of a planet saying it was too small to pack sufficient gravitational punch.

It was downgraded to a new, second-class status: “dwarf planet.” So then there were eight: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, or “My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos.”

The Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics put it in a press release, “a dwarf fruit tree is still a small fruit tree, and a dwarf hamster is still a small hamster.”

Recently, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center held a debate — pro and con — and let the audience vote, resulting in a decision that "Pluto IS a planet.”

The debate centered around the IAU’s demands of a planet — that it must be in orbit around the Sun, be round or nearly round, and be shown to have “cleared the neighborhood” around its orbit, be gravitationally dominant in its area — the big kid on the block.

Pluto was originally kicked out because it did not “clear the neighborhood.” It is indeed small and has a radius of about 750 miles — less than 20 per cent of the Earth’s radius.

Its circumference is about 4,500 miles, which makes it smaller than the moon. One could fly around its equator faster than flying from Washington, DC, to Hawaii.