Gonzalo Tancredi

Gonzalo Tancredi

Gonzalo Tancredi was born on 8 March 1963. He is an Uruguayan astronomer. He works at the Department of Astronomy at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is part of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and works at Los Molinos Observatory.

In 2010, Tancredi studied objects that might be dwarf planets. The IAU looked at this work but did not make any changes because of it. There is an asteroid named after him, called 5088 Tancredi. It is found in a part of space called the Themistian group.

Definition of planet

In 2006, Gonzalo Tancredi did not agree with the IAU’s meeting to establish the first definition of "planet.” He and his friend Julio Ángel Fernández from Uruguay had a different idea. They thought only objects in the Solar System that had cleared away other small things should be called planets. They called the other round objects that hadn’t cleared things away “planetoids.” The IAU used some of their ideas, but called those objects “dwarf planets.”