They had me worried there for a bit. Scientists were seriously considering letting sentimentality and public opinion decide the facts. Not that I have anything at all against someone considering Pluto one of their favorite celestial bodies, but for pete's sake it's not a planet! Sure it's got its own moon, but c'mon! Its orbit is kattywhumpus to the plane of all the "real" planets, plus it sneaks inside Neptune's orbit for part of its year. And where would it end? Xena? The next dozen objects they find out in the Kuiper belt? Would you seriously want your kid to have to build a solar system model with 10,000 planets?
Okay yes, Pluto has been a planet since the 1930s, but guess what -- the asteroid Ceres was labeled a planet for 50 years before they discovered it was just one component of the asteroid belt. That's how science works: corrections are made as new facts are discovered. For example, Brontosaurus was renamed Apatosaurus when it was realized the same dinosaur had been discovered twice (the official name going to the first find).
So sorry all you Pluto fans, your fav (along with Ceres, Xena, and who knows what all) is now properly called a dwarf planet. Although as a nod to sentimentality, I would have been happy with the proposal to call them all plutoids but that didn't stick. Oh well. Can't win them all.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment