If it’s orbiting a star, it’s a planet. If it’s orbiting a planet, it’s a moon. If it’s orbiting nothing, it’s a target.

(This thing is a planet. It orbits a star. Doesn’t matter if that star orbits another star. By definition, it’s a planet.)

A newly discovered cosmic object is not a planet, not a moon — but a third thing we don’t have a name for yet.

To me, this opening sentence summarizes the whole article. We shouldn’t expect to have handy, accurate, convenient labels for everything when we’ve only observed a tiny fraction of our own galactic “neighborhood”. Running into weird stuff is the entire point of exploration, and I love it!

We can’t even decide if brown dwarfs are stars or gas giants so I say we shelve this debate until we solve that one.

This is a lot of hype to say that a planet, an object which orbits a star, is a planet. Anyone who has been seriously looking at stars and thinking about what makes up the universe has come to the conclusion that the thing that orbits a star (and has all the other criteria of a planet) is a planet, even if the star it’s orbiting also orbits another star.

Likewise, the idea that a moon can have a moon has been discussed. The problem is that the rules for what constitutes a moon make it hard for that to happen so, given the size of the Milky Way, there’s probably a number of examples out there.

Well I say we go out there and twat it!

And then there were eight