Sad Little Pluto

You know what, Pluto does not care what we mere specks on planet Earth call it !
Also, nobody will arrest you for calling it anything you like.
There is no minimum sentence for calling it a planet. !

If it's discoverer and first visitor Clive Tombaugh called it a planet then I'll call it a planet.

Incidentally Pluto and Charon carried the souls of the dead to the Underworld.

It's amazing that the first human "visitor" to Pluto is a dead one.
The ahes of Tombaugh are now on the New Horizons craft winging its way to ...the Underworld of Pluto and Charon.

I am thinking that the general discontent among amateur astronomers is not just sentimental upset, or even scientific upset it a bit deeper than that. I think it’s a primal discontent, a disturbance of our place, of our sense of ourselves in the solar system.

I mean the Solar System is so big, but most people would have some sort of concept of it and accept that the nine planet system is our address in the universe. That is a kinda comfortable notion we have all grown up with, the knowledge of Earth's place in the line of Nine from the Sun. Making fundamental change however large or small it is perceived does something to that comfort factor, the sense of belonging, the sense of place.

Now new planets like Sedna etc expanding our solar system address seems fine, but demoting such an established and physiologically and psychologically embraced planet like Pluto is not.

Deirdre Kelleghan
Irish Astronomical Society
www.irishastrosoc.org

Very good point Deirdre, ones I agree with.
Many people dont like change and I can imagine some not wanting to demote the status of this solarsystem by "removing" one of the planets.

But progress is progress and we need strict bullet proof definitions for these, I have alot less respect for the IAU after this, they also can't come up with a simple naming system for extra solar planets.


on a lighter note, the following wont work any more

My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets
maybe we'll go over to
My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Neptune.....

My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets
maybe we'll go over to
My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Neptune.....

Pluto a Planet?
My Very Educated Mother Just Said Uh... No!

Maybe our national poet W.B.Yeats was writing about those people when he wrote:

Seek then no learning from the starry men.
Who follow with the optic glass
The whirling ways of stars that pass--
Seek,then,for this is also sooth,
No word of theirs--the cold star bane
Hath cloven and rent their hearts in twain,
And dead is all their human truth.