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How Pluto Stopped Being a Planet by Tyrone Nielson For decades, people believed our solar system had nine planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. But in 2006, a group of astronomers decided that Pluto was not a true planet but something else: a dwarf planet. The term "dwarf planet" might make you think that Pluto was kicked out of the planet club solely because of its size. And it's true that Pluto is small compared with the planets. If Earth were the size of a basketball, Pluto would be the size of a golf ball. But Pluto's size isn't why most astronomers now call it a dwarf planet. So why the change to Pluto's status? Here's why. In August 2006, astronomers came up with a new definition of planet. To be a planet, they said, an object has to meet three conditions. . It has to orbit the Sun directly. It can't be a moon orbiting a planet. . It has to be massive enough for its own gravity to pull it into the shape of a ball. . It has to have cleared its neighborhood of smaller objects around its orbit. In other words, during its trips around the Sun, a planet must draw smaller objects into itself, or pull them into its orbit, or fling them off into space.