Xena: new planet?

With the Recent Announcement that we may be gaining a few more planets, I thought I should share my thoughts on it.

First off, as most scientists say, no way should Pluto keep its planetary status and not give the same to Xena (or 2003 UB313 to its friends), since it's bigger.

But having said that, I debated for quite a while what should be done. Obviously for sentimental reasons it would be nice for Pluto to still be a planet, since that's what we've all grown up with.

But the new proposal, to have Pluto and Xena, as well as Charon (Pluto's partner) and Ceres (a large asteroid) join the ranks of the "big 8" irks me. Especially when there could be as many as a dozen more of these things out there. I don't mind them all being called plutons, but I don't like them being planets.

So I say, keep the total number of planets to 8. It's a good round number (well, a good cube number). It makes there 4 inner solid planets and 4 outer gas planets, which seems like a nice distinction, and basically closes the door to constantly having to update textbooks. Keep plutons in their own category, which will grow and change as we discover more about the outer reaches of our solar system, but don't keep changing the planets around on us.