Pluto, we hardly knew ye...

Well, that’s it- Pluto has been demoted. Poor little Pluto is no longer a planet.

School children the world over will mourn but this new reclassification is as close to a good decision that could have been hoped for out of The International Astronomical Union. The group has been meeting for what seems like forever to clear up the planetary mess that’s developed over the years and they appear to have bitten the bullet and done the right thing.

Pluto’s status as a planet has always been a topic of scientific debate. We weren’t taught that in school and so we’ve always considered it to be as legitimate as the big eight, but it never was.

The twin facts that kids love it and that it’s the only planet discovered by an American kept it in the show longer than it ever deserved. The death knell came when another planet was discovered recently that’s a bit larger and three times farther from Pluto than Pluto is from the Sun.

It became obvious that new and better telescopes were going to keep finding these pieces of round cosmic debris from the Kuiper Belt and calling them all planets was going to lead to an absurdly crowded neighborhood. So the experts did the right thing and acted to rectify the situation.

We can all be thankful that the idiotic ideas floated out of this meeting a few weeks ago (see earlier blog entitled ‘Outer Space Outrage’) that would have added three planets, including a couple of moons, were shot down.

In fact my suggested solution in that earlier blog was very nearly completely adopted. I wanted to see a system of Major and Minor planets and Pluto’s new designation as one in a new classification of ‘Dwarf’ planets is much the same idea.

I didn’t get everything I wanted. It’s my contention that in order to be a planet the sizable round object should be required to orbit the sun primarily, ruling out all moons. This doesn’t seem to have been made into a hard and fast rule but the qualifier that the round object must “clear the neighborhood around its orbit” goes a long way toward the goal of insisting that a planet have the Sun as it’s main dancing partner.

Now those smart guys should get together and have another meeting to decide on a proper name for our own moon. Other planets get moons with really cool names like Titan, Callisto, and Charon... but our moon is just called the moon. That seems kinda crappy.