Let’s extend our hand to a family member who was ousted from our extra-terrestrial family on spurious grounds back in 2006. No, it’s not your brother-in-law who finally got a job.
It was Pluto, a celestial ice-ball of frozen methane that might be making its way back into the solar system family as a full-fledged planet once again. We hope it can come back into the fold because we believe it had the ‘best’ name next to Uranus. (properly pronounced by the worldly, intellectually oriented news journalist Walter Cronkite)
First discovered and classified as a planet in 1930, Pluto was relegated to “dwarf-planet” designation by the International Astronomical Union 20 years ago. Pluto, they said, fails the key requirement of having “cleared its orbital path” of other Kuiper Belt objects so it cannot be classified as a planet. OK, so it’s a little ‘slow’. That doesn’t mean it can’t ‘catch up’.
Did someone slip some mind-altering drugs into the juice during their confab and make them ‘dis’ our littlest planet? They said there were too many rocks outside Neptune’s orbit just about the same size as the cute orb, therefore Pluto could not be a planet.
They compared her to a rock. Maybe that’s why she’s been in interplanetary therapy since she was rejected.
3.6 billion miles from the sun; it’s the farthest ‘rock’ in orbit and deserves a little respect. It could have spun out of our solar system before we even knew it was there. It chose to stay and rankle some scientists who didn’t think it was far enough along to be a ‘regulation size’ planet. There we go, making fun of something smaller than us!
All it might take is one more nasty remark and our tiniest planet could get flung from its orbit like a ‘Dancing with the Stars’ heavy set ex actor trying to negotiate a full on 360 degrees move with a few high-speed spins on one leg. The last faux dancer who tried that move injured a family in the front row when his tap shoe flew off at high speed and incredibly bounced off the father’s head and got entangled in a cameraman’s headset and almost strangled the poor guy. Stop tape!
Now, some scientists say that Pluto should be back. We love the ‘old days’ and since the ‘new days’ are fraught with unanswerable questions, we lean on things we’re familiar with, like Peanut butter and jelly, cash and smartphones.
Harvard science historian Owen Gingerich, who chairs the IAU planet definition committee, argued at a forum last month that “a planet is a culturally defined word that changes over time, like ‘rap’ music”, although we still can’t comprehend it.
We should be nice to our celestial neighbor. You never know when we might need another place to live.
