As you probably know, 3,000 astronomers are meeting this week in Prague to decide the fate of Pluto and the very solar system as we know it.

The New York Times reports:

In e-mail messages from Prague, Owen Gingerich, chairman of the union’s Planet Definition Committee, said, “It was only accidental that Pluto remained a planet” in their proposal. Nor had they tried to calculate how many new planets would result.

Today the group will be offering a new proposal, taking orbital dynamics as well as roundness into account. “The eight classical planets will still be central to the meaning of planet, and the other round nonsatellite objects will all be dwarf planets,” he wrote, “but there will still be a special category for which Pluto is the prototype.”

So it’s still up in the air whether the astronomical importance of these bodies will change, and if they do, how that change will be made and what the astrological significance will be. Astronomers are sharply divided on whether or not Pluto should remain a planet, and many feel that the retention of Pluto in the planetary definition would open the door to hundreds and possibly thousands of other planets and other objects.

The International Astronomers Union is set to vote on Thursday just after the New Moon in Virgo which is exceedingly appropriate since Virgo loves classification and pigeonholing objects into their appropriate category. Meanwhile, manyVedic astrologers are unfazed by this turn of events since they typically don’t work with any of the planets beyond Saturn anyway.