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The Prague IAU General Assembly, Pluto and the IAU processes

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2019

Ron Ekers
Ron Ekers*
Affiliation:
CSIRO Fellow, IAU President 2003–2006, CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science Australia Telescope National facility, P.O. Box 76, Epping NSW 1710, Australia email: ron.ekers@csiro.au
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Abstract

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At the Sydney IAU General Assembly (GA) the statutes were modified to remove the votes by individual members. Few noticed this at the time but the subsequent reaction by disenfranchised members led us to revise this position in Prague. The need to have a members’ vote on the status of Pluto was complicated by these changes and the drama behind the scene at the Prague GA where the planet definition was resolved is not well known despite the huge public impact of this GA. I will describe some of the activities of the executive and its working groups during this very exciting GA. The IAU structures served us well during this process but of course there were also many lessons learned.

Keywords

IAUPraguePlanet DefinitionPluto
Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 13 , Symposium S349: Under One Sky: The IAU Centenary Symposium , December 2018 , pp. 51 - 57
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2019 

References

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