Poor Pluto

How degrading! Literally. Poor old Pluto has been stripped of its planet status. All those years of learning about the nine planets in our solar system and now we find out that Pluto doesn’t count. Why? Because it isn’t big enough, apparently. Or more to the point it is as big as other stuff floating around which means if Pluto is a planet then other chunks of rock like 2005FY9 and Xena must also be classified as planets. So rather than add new planets to the solar system the ‘nerds in the know’ decided to take Pluto off the list.

Personally, I don’t really care. Maybe if I had intricately built a model of the solar system in school from polystyrene balls and coat hanger wire I might be a little pissed off that I’d spent all that time on a planet that didn’t belong, but fortunately I was too lazy in school to ever put that much effort into any project.

I guess my only issue is the new category that Pluto has been resigned to. Officially Pluto is now a ‘dwarf planet’. Now, that would be cool if it meant that Pluto was actually a planet inhabited by dwarves with miniature cities and little cars and nobody different enough to play Santa’s helper at Christmas. But it doesn’t. It just means that it is a small planet. I guess they thought that still having ‘planet’ in the title might appease the Pluto fans around the world. But really, if you aren’t a planet and you’re never going to be a planet, why rub it in? Why not come up with a cool new term? Start a new club that will make the real planets jealous and want to join. I’m surprised that the geeks didn’t think of that.

So, now all our space books and solar system charts are wrong and new ones need to be printed. I guess someone will make some bucks out of this. Let’s hope they don’t start re-classifying anything else that we learnt in school. I don’t want to wake up and find out that ‘X’ isn’t actually a letter or that spiders are really insects after all or that February is now a ‘dwarf month’.

I guess greater minds than mine are on top of these things. And apologies to the International Astronomical Union for calling them nerds and geeks. I’m sure they are all very interesting, cool and exciting men and women with great social lives.

And commiserations to Clyde Tombaugh who discovered Pluto in 1930. I guess he won’t care seeing as he died in 1997 but I’m sure his family is disappointed that their big claim to fame is now that their relative found a rock.

Until next time…