Plutogate

Pluto

A group of scientists want you to think of the Milky Way differently. There are nine planets no more.

This information from NASA is now false.

Read the happy greeting.

Welcome to our Solar System. One sun, nine planets and millions of other objects make our little neighborhood in the universe an interesting place to live.

How quaint!


This page from another NASA site will also have to be rewritten.

This is the clearest view yet of the distant planet Pluto and its moon, Charon, as revealed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. The image was taken by the European Space Agency's Faint Object Camera on February 21, 1994 when the planet was 4.4 billion km (2.6 billion mi) from Earth. Hubble's corrected optics show the two objects as clearly separate and sharp disks. This has allowed astronomers to measure (to within about 1 percent) Pluto's diameter of 2320 km (1440 mi) and Charon's diameter of 1270 km (790 mi). The Hubble observations show that Charon is bluer than Pluto. This means that both worlds have different surface composition and structure. A bright highlight on Pluto suggests it has a smoothly reflecting surface layer.

Pluto

You may say, "So what? Who cares?"

I care. I don't like this. I don't like it all.

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Pluto, beloved by some as a cosmic underdog but scorned by astronomers who considered it too dinky and distant, was unceremoniously stripped of its status as a planet Thursday.

The International Astronomical Union, dramatically reversing course just a week after floating the idea of reaffirming Pluto's planethood and adding three new planets to Earth's neighborhood, downgraded the ninth rock from the sun in historic new galactic guidelines.

...Powerful new telescopes, experts said, are changing the way they size up the mysteries of the solar system and beyond. But the scientists at the conference showed a soft side, waving plush toys of the Walt Disney character Pluto the dog — and insisting that Pluto's spirit will live on in the exciting discoveries yet to come.

I don't think waving stuffed Pluto toys is showing a soft side. I think it's kind of weird.

"The word 'planet' and the idea of planets can be emotional because they're something we learn as children," said Richard Binzel, a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped hammer out the new definition.

"This is really all about science, which is all about getting new facts," he said. "Science has marched on. ... Many more Plutos wait to be discovered."

Pluto, a planet since 1930, got the boot because it didn't meet the new rules, which say a planet not only must orbit the sun and be large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but must "clear the neighborhood around its orbit." That disqualifies Pluto, whose oblong orbit overlaps Neptune's, downsizing the solar system to eight planets from the traditional nine.

Astronomers have labored without a universal definition of a planet since well before the time of Copernicus, who proved that the Earth revolves around the sun, and the experts gathered in Prague burst into applause when the guidelines were passed.

I think it was political.

Clearly, the definition of a planet was written to exclude Pluto.

There are some in the scientific community that were bent on destroying our solar system as we know it.

I think these scientists have a stake in writing text books. They know that they will have to compile new editions. They are likely to benefit financially from the "discovery" that Pluto isn't a planet.

The ugly underbelly of science has been exposed!

Predictably, Pluto's demotion provoked plenty of wistful nostalgia.

"It's disappointing in a way, and confusing," said Patricia Tombaugh, the 93-year-old widow of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.

"I don't know just how you handle it. It kind of sounds like I just lost my job," she said from Las Cruces, N.M. "But I understand science is not something that just sits there. It goes on. Clyde finally said before he died, 'It's there. Whatever it is. It is there.'"

That's sad. I feel sorry for Mrs. Tombaugh.

Pluto has been considered a planet for 76 years.

Now, with the stroke of a pen or a vote or whatever, it's not.

I find that very difficult to accept.

I'm not sure how, but I have a feeling that an albino monk had something to do with it.

The decision by the IAU, the official arbiter of heavenly objects, restricts membership in the elite cosmic club to the eight classical planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Pluto and objects like it will be known as "dwarf planets," which raised some thorny questions about semantics: If a raincoat is still a coat, and a cell phone is still a phone, why isn't a dwarf planet still a planet?

Exactly!

Those are all excellent questions. Is a dwarf planet not a planet?

Why call it a planet at all?

Is size that important when it comes to planets?

Mercury isn't huge.


There is something very wrong about this. There must be a cover-up or something.

NASA said Pluto's downgrade would not affect its $700 million New Horizons spacecraft mission, which this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.

But mission head Alan Stern said he was "embarrassed" by Pluto's undoing and predicted that Thursday's vote would not end the debate. Although 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations attended the conference, only about 300 showed up to vote.

"It's a sloppy definition. It's bad science," he said. "It ain't over."

I'm with Stern.

Only 300 astronomers voted. That's not enough to disrupt our view of our "little neighborhood" in the universe. They staged a coup!

In all seriousness, Pluto's new designation reveals that hard science isn't all that hard.

Under the new rules, two of the three objects that came tantalizingly close to planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed "Xena." The third object, Pluto's largest moon, Charon, isn't in line for any special designation.

Brown, whose Xena find rekindled calls for Pluto's demise because it showed it isn't nearly as unique as it once seemed, waxed philosophical.

"Eight is enough," he said, jokingly adding: "I may go down in history as the guy who killed Pluto."

Brown is on an ego trip. Bastard!

Pluto will always be a planet in my universe.

International Astronomical Union be damned!