Pluto my Beloved
Context: For anyone who grew up before 2006, Pluto was the ninth planet. Then the International Astronomical Union changed the definition of a planet and poor Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet status. Now it's just a nostalgic memory, and Grandpa Simpson says it best.
13 replies
In his time Ceres was also a planet so there were more then 9.
It wasn't, though. The planets were basically defined as "it's those 9 there".
People only started to push for a property-based definition when we started finding exoplanets. And only really moved into it when a 11th candidate was found and there were some 3 or 4 more possible ones.
I always preferred the other definition of planet that would make the earth no longer have a moon - instead we would be a dual-planet system.
I'm not an astronomer and so my opinion was correctly ignored. I can still disagree with it.
Fun facts:
The Earth's moon is three times bigger than Pluto.
Jupiter has four moons larger than Pluto.
Saturn has a moon larger than Pluto.
And Neptune has a moon larger than Pluto.
Pluto also has a moon the same size as Pluto
Of all things that don't matter, whether Pluto is a planet matters the least. It's completely irrelevant.
But, also:
Pluto's a Fucking Planet! B**ch!
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7963278-how-i-killed-pluto-and-why-it-had-it-coming
You'd think a book like this might be dry, and it is definitely not. Excellent read.
I hate this "IT'S STILL A PLANET TO ME!" thing. How does our definition of made up words matter? Pluto is still Pluto, how we categorise stuff doesn't change that. We needed a better way to define things and needed to make that without having to keep all the celestial objects in our solar system defined as they were before.
Maybe we'll find Planet X and have 9 again in the future.
My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nothing :(