Last June, astronomers discovered a new planet, one tenth thie diameter (and one hundredth the volume) of the Earth, but is bigger than all the asteroids put together.

Hopefully this won't turn into another 'it's a planet, it's a comet, it's an asteroit, it's a moonlet' astro-pissfight. True, it's smaller than Pluto, but it doesn't have Pluto's ambiguous orbit, and a rock 800 miles in diameter in a regular circular orbit in the planetary plane isn't a trivial mass.

The discoverers dubbed the planet 'Quaoar,' after the 'great force of nature that summoned the world into being' worshiped by the Tongva people who inhabited the Los Angeles area before Western infiltration.

On another note, I found one paragraph in BBC article amusing:

However, Quaoar is not an official name - at least not yet. In a few months, the International Astronomical Union, astronomy's governing body, will vote on it.

I like the wording they used. It just reminds me of Enterprise last season, when T'pol says that the Vulcan Science Directorate has established that time trave doesn't exist. Astronomy isn't like football, the stock market, or Paraguay. A science can't have a governing body. Sure they can vote on what to call a planet, or whether to even classify it as a planet, but I'd like to see them try to vote on Kepler's laws of planetary motion, the gravitational constant, or Chandrasekhar's limit.

So: Another planet. First new one in 76 years. Nifty, but I wouldn't want to build a summer home there.