HoNoToGroABeMo Day Thirty-One: It Is Done
5 years ago
9:05 PM
Pluto kicked out the Planet Club
Pluto Not a Planet, Astronomers Rule
Mason Inman
for National Geographic News
The distant, ice-covered world is no longer a true planet, according to a new definition of the term voted on by scientists today.
"Whoa! Pluto's dead," said astronomer Mike Brown, of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, as he watched a Webcast of the vote. "There are finally, officially, eight planets in the solar system."
In a move that's already generating controversy and will force textbooks to be rewritten, Pluto will now be dubbed a dwarf planet.
But it's no longer part of an exclusive club, since there are more than 40 of these dwarfs, including the large asteroid Ceres and 2003 UB313, nicknamed Xena—a distant object slightly larger than Pluto discovered by Brown last year.
"We know of 44" dwarf planets so far, Brown said. "We will find hundreds. It's a very huge category."
A clear majority of researchers voted for the new definition at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague, in the Czech Republic. The IAU decides the official names of all celestial bodies.
The tough decision comes after a multiyear search for a scientific definition of the word "planet." The term never had an official meaning before.
So long, tiny buddy! We grew up reciting you and you were always the tail end of "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pancakes" Alas, you are NOW in the Palookaville league of planetary "objects"...
It's a strange feeling, experiencing scientific history like this. I don't feel sentimental about Pluto not being a planet any more; it's just something from my youth that I was used to, like gravitational pull, the seasons and an ozone layer. There are reasonably compelling reasons for the change in status. Pluto has an extremely slow, elliptical orbit, and is so small that its nearest neighbor, Charon, is about half its size. I guess Pluto has always been part of the solar system's riff-raff. Sob! We've been foooling ourselves!!
Did you know that since Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh in 1930, it has only gone about 20% of ONE ORBIT around the Sun?? That's a slow progression, man!
You might be wondering if Tombaugh is spinning in his grave right now. Far from it! In a very classy touch, NASA sent the New Horizons probe to Pluto in January of this year. On board are the ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, making his final voyage.
