I know I am getting old because I hate change. Daylights savings time always messes me up. I used to be able to identify most of the countries of the world on a map, but things keep changing. I forget that there isn’t a USSR anymore and that there isn’t an East and West Germany and those are good changes! About the only change that doesn’t mess me up is my baby’s diaper changes.
And now, something else I have known since grade school may change as well. Pluto, the ninth planet, maybe be unplanetized. Okay, that is not a real word, but there are astronomers from 75 countries are meeting in Prague this week to determine if Pluto really is a planet.
What cause the need for this conference? Well, there is an object larger than Pluto and further away as well. Pluto is a tiny little planet – there are even seven moons bigger than Pluto, including our own.
The decision to remove Pluto as a planet and possibly add other objects is a difficult call. Astronomers are split as whether to remove it from the planet listing or not. The conference hopes to set specific criteria, such as size, for what qualifies an object to be called a planet. This search for planet criteria was intensified when astronomer Michael Brown identified Xena, an object larger than Pluto and approximately 9 billion miles from the Sun. Even if Pluto isn’t removed from the planet list, Xena may be added. Great, more change! They may decide to group the planets by category, which would surely further confuse grade schoolers.
This isn’t the first time Pluto has been under scrutiny. Since Clyde W. Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona discovered Pluto in 1930, there have been questions about Pluto. They originally thought it was the same size as the Earth, but it turned out to be much smaller. It also had odd behavior for a planet including an elongated orbit.
Pluto as compared to the Earth
Poor little Pluto – 3,670,050,000 miles from the sun – and now even the planet title may be stripped away from the little…uh…astrological thingy.