My world has been rocked. Well, ALL the worlds have been rocked, actually.
As of just a few days ago, Pluto is no longer a planet. He's been kicked out of the house for good, relegated to the cold and lonely yard of the Kuiper Belt. The International Astronomical Union has a heart, giving old Pluto honorary status as a "dwarf planet" and not completely demoting it to just another Kuiper Object, but old Pluto will never be let in the Big House again.
Apparently, part of the new definition of a planet is having had cleared its own path around the Sun, which, if you remember your tricky elementary school science teacher, Pluto never did. Remember that Pluto had that long, elliptical orbit that sometimes made it the planet farthest from the Sun, sometimes not.
Then we found out problematic things like Pluto actually has three moons instead of one, and that it was actually smaller than a new object called Xena that some didn't want to call a new planet, which obviously left Plutonic problems of classification for scientists.
And that got you kicked out of the house.
So I hope you and that other Disney dog will fare well out in the cold reaches of space. Still, I wonder if, as astronomers discover all these new extrasolar planets orbiting other stars, any room will be made for Pluto, and another old space dog?
C'mon, astrometricists! Since names of extrasolar planets – such as "Gliese 86 A" or "HD 11964" or "Epsilon Reticuli A" – don't exactly roll off the tongue, how about throwing old Pluto and even beloved Goofy a bone?
[Read here and here and here for more interesting info on all these developments.]
