Gonzalo Tancredi

Gonzalo Tancredi (born 8 March 1963) is an Uruguayan astronomer and a full professor in the Department of Astronomy at the University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay. He is an active member of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) and works as an investigator at Los Molinos Observatory.

In 2010, Tancredi did an important study looking at objects that might be dwarf planets. This work was looked at by the IAU, though they did not take any action based on it. There is an asteroid named after him, called 5088 Tancredi, located in a part of space known as the Themistian group.

Definition of planet

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