Hubble's look at a brown dwarf and mystery companion. Click for larger. Credit: Hubblesite

Everybody remembers the shock of the news when Pluto was demoted from being a planet into becoming a hapless minor planet. The IAU hardly saw the ensuing furor coming. You don’t just go messing with the planets for any old reason. What they really did was underestimate the value of public relations. In the eyes of the public they “demoted” a perfectly good planet to MINOR planet status…minor indeed! Hmmph!

I for one do understand why the IAU did what they did. All they really needed to do was to use better salesmanship, maybe something like mini-planet or maybe dainty-planet or something along those lines, but never minor. It seems pretty obvious the public will toss out a tried and true anything for a pig-in-a-poke if it is marketed correctly, we do it all the time. Heck sometimes all we have to do is be told we will like it, and that’s good enough until we unwrap the package to see what really awaits us and by then it’s too late one way or the other.

Now enter Hubble and the image above of a Brown Dwarf Star and a mystery companion.  Is it a planet?  Is it a star?  Where is the dividing line?  Somehow if when the discussion is reversed on the Pluto topic I don’t think we would have the same problem.

Background from Hubblesite:

As our telescopes grow more powerful, astronomers are uncovering objects that defy conventional wisdom. This latest example is the discovery of a planet-like object circling a brown dwarf. It’s the right size for a planet, estimated to be 5-10 times the mass of Jupiter. There has been a lot of discussion in the context of the Pluto debate over how small an object can be and still be called a planet. This new observation addresses the question at the other end of the size spectrum: How small can an object be and still be a brown dwarf rather than a planet? This new companion is within the range of masses observed for planets around stars — less than 15 Jupiter masses. But should it be called a planet? The answer is strongly connected to the mechanism by which the companion most likely formed. What’s even more puzzling is that the object formed in just 1 million years, a very short time to make a planet according to conventional theory.

Read the full story and see more images at Hubblesite.