And then there were eight.
“Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.” (I like that the NYTimes URL is “AP-Planet-Mutiny.html”, heheheh.)
Says K: “That’s going to hurt property taxes.”
I figure this is going to be like convincing people that the millennium was 1 January 2001, not 2000. Of course the problem here is that if the bar for planethood were lowered to include Pluto, the number of known planets in the solar system would instantly inflate to over two dozen (including Charon, Pluto’s moon satellite).
It turns out this down-sizing of the planet census isn’t without precedent. 1 Ceres was originally classified as a planet but then demoted to an asteroid. With this recent development 1 Ceres will be considered a dwarf planet along with Pluto and the kick-assedly named Trans-Neptunian Object 2003 UB313.
I’m not sold on the nomenclature “dwarf planet,” though. I think there’s a dramatic shortage of things that rhyme with “oid,” so we ought to be calling it a planetoid. That sounds like the kind of thing that clumsy box-shaped robots with flailing arms and monotone voices would populate, whereas Dwarf Planet just sounds like a grumpy under-sized pile of rock circling the sun with its arms crossed and a scowl wrapped around its bulbous nose.
Says K: “That’s going to hurt property taxes.”
I figure this is going to be like convincing people that the millennium was 1 January 2001, not 2000. Of course the problem here is that if the bar for planethood were lowered to include Pluto, the number of known planets in the solar system would instantly inflate to over two dozen (including Charon, Pluto’s moon satellite).
It turns out this down-sizing of the planet census isn’t without precedent. 1 Ceres was originally classified as a planet but then demoted to an asteroid. With this recent development 1 Ceres will be considered a dwarf planet along with Pluto and the kick-assedly named Trans-Neptunian Object 2003 UB313.
I’m not sold on the nomenclature “dwarf planet,” though. I think there’s a dramatic shortage of things that rhyme with “oid,” so we ought to be calling it a planetoid. That sounds like the kind of thing that clumsy box-shaped robots with flailing arms and monotone voices would populate, whereas Dwarf Planet just sounds like a grumpy under-sized pile of rock circling the sun with its arms crossed and a scowl wrapped around its bulbous nose.