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Does Pluto deserve a place among our solar system's main planets, or were astronomers right to demote it to second-class status? Two years ago, poor Pluto's plight touched off the dispute over the how you define a planet, but now it's about much more than one little icy world. The Great Planet Debate rises to a whole new level this week, and thanks to the Internet, you can join in the debate yourself.
The long-awaited debate takes center stage at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory, which is the base of science operations for NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto and other denizens of the solar system's outer regions.
The main event comes at 4:30 p.m. ET Thursday, when Mark Sykes of the Arizona-based Planetary Science Institute faces off against Neil deGrasse Tyson of New York's Hayden Planetarium. You can register to watch the Sykes-Tyson debate as well as other "Great Planet Debate" presentations via streaming video. The event's organizers also hope to pass along some questions for the debaters from the online audience.