Hoping to end the agonizing over whether Pluto is really a planet, an international committee of astronomers has come up with a new definition that would save the tiny body’s place in the Sun’s family.

Under the long-awaited proposal, Pluto would remain in the pantheon of planets by becoming the prototype of a new sub-category of tiny, outer solar system objects dubbed “plutons” – planets, but distinct from the eight larger “classical” planets closer to the Sun.

The changes would require astronomy textbooks to be rewritten and every school child to be taught a new vision of the solar system because three other orbs would get promoted to planet status as well – expanding the total from the traditional nine to 12.

“Everybody’s been wanting to know, ‘Is Pluto a planet?”‘ said Richard Binzel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served on the seven-member committee assembled by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) to try to settle the explosive issue. “The answer is: ‘Yes, Virginia, Pluto is a planet.'”

The proposal to resolve the dispute is being officially unveiled today at the IAU’s General Assembly in Prague, Czech Republic, where it will be hotly debated until Aug. 24, when about 1,000 astronomers will vote on it. While some astronomers expressed some misgivings about the new definition, it generally drew initial praise and several predicted it would be ratified.

“I think it’s a good compromise,” said Larry Esposito of the University of Colorado, who had opposed maintaining Pluto and similar bodies as planets. “They’re really too small and don’t amount to much. But it would be too difficult to demote Pluto. This way we don’t have to scratch it off the list.”

The status of Pluto, the smallest of the nine planets, has been called into question by the discovery in recent years of other objects of similar size and distance from the Sun. But suggestions that Pluto be demoted prompted heated debate and angry denunciations.

In an attempt to settle the issue, the IAU assembled a 19-member committee, which deadlocked after two years of intensive debate. That led to creation of the smaller committee, which met in Paris June 10 and July 1 to try to find a way out of the thicket.

Under the new definition, a planet would be defined as any body that is massive enough to be round that is not a star but is orbiting one.

“These are the most fundamental physical parameters that apply not only in our solar system but everywhere in the universe, ” Binzel said. “That’s what’s so appealing about the definition – it can be applied universally.”

Under the definition, the eight “classical” planets would be Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Ceres, an object located between Mars and Jupiter that had long been considered an asteroid, would now be considered a planet.

“One might call it a ‘dwarf planet,’ but that’s not an official term,” Binzel said.

Pluto and another object discovered orbiting it in 1978 called Charon, and a body discovered in 2003 that is slightly further from the Sun, temporarily named UB313, would be plutons. A pluton would be any planet beyond Neptune.

“Currently we know of three, but there are other objects that are close in size to Pluto that will have to go through an evaluation process to determine whether they will be considered plutons,” Binzel said. “We fully expect there are even more discoveries to come that are likely to be in this class of plutons.”

Binzel and other committee members stressed that categorizing Pluto as a pluton was in no way meant to downgrade its longtime status as the ninth planet.

“We might be demoting it from the list of eight classical planets, but we’re promoting it by making it the head of its own special class,” said Owen Gingerich of Harvard University, who chaired the panel.