Xena becomes Eris! All Hail Discordia!

The Register reports:

The distant rock which prompted astronomers to strip Pluto of its planethood has been offically named Eris, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced Wednesday.

Eris is the Greek goddess of discord, hinting at the troubled ordination of the newly-discovered body.

One of Eris' discoverers, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, told AP the new name was "too perfect to resist." Eris' moon gets the monicker Dysnomia, after Eris' daughter — the spirit of lawlessness — in Greek mythology.

So, just to confuse the situation further for layfolk like us . . . we now have a solar system composed of a star, eight "real" planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune), and an as-yet-undetermined number of dwarf planets, starting with Ceres, Pluto, and Eris.