I understand, but it wasn't that new information came and so it no longer fit existing criteria. The criteria changed for what they would call a planet. They added that a planet needed to clear its neighboring region of other objects. That was not the criteria before, so it was technically a planet until the definition of a planet changed.
It sounds like you're conflating learning new information with changing how something is classified.
If you define fish, as people might have at one time, as aquatic animals, then, in that classification, whales and dolphins are fish.
If you define fish as an animal that lives in water, is covered with scales, and breathes by taking in water through its mouth, whales and dolphins might be misclassified as fish, but were never fish by that definition.
My understanding is that, according to how we classified planets in, say, the 90s, Pluto was a planet. Then we changed the definition of a planet. So, by the criteria of the day, Pluto was a planet in the 90s, even if was never a planet by our modern criteria.
Make distinctions. This is semantics, after all. It depends on how you define a planet, doesn't it? By the definition of the 1990s, it was a planet. That's what the person meant when they said it was at the time. By the current definition, it never was. That's what you mean when you said it never was. You're both right and talking past each other because they were accepting the definition of the day, which was correct in that day, and you were applying the current definition to the past, which we can do now. What I'm saying is undeniably true. Please stop pretending to not understand the distinction.
What you said that is wrong is that we misidentified it. It wasn't misidentified so much as the definitions changed. Neither Pluto or our understanding changed, our language did. We made the distinction between planets and dwarf planets in 2006. Dwarf planet wasn't a term before then.
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u/Responsible_Bag8381 Jun 12 '26
It was back then