The planetary avery

I was disappointed with tonight’s episode of Catalyst, Australia’s weekly science journalism TV program. It’s not that the stories were intrinsically uninteresting, by any means, but they were presented poorly. Too much waffle; not enough meat. They told me about some very worthwhile and promising research, but didn’t leave me with the feeling that I’d learned something new and fascinating about the world.

I’d made up my mind, however, that tonight’s post would be about science. If there was nothing on Catalyst worth blogging about, my backup topic would be the big astronomy story from earlier in the year: the redefinition of the word “planet”. [Update: more here.]

So that’s what I’m going to talk about. And I’m going to start with this cute little graph, which I’ll explain in a moment (you’ll need to click on the thumbnail to see the graph properly).