Pluto, We Barely Knew Thee

I can't believe they took Pluto away from us. It's like our universe has changed. In my life, there have always been nine planets. That's just the way it was.

And just like that, now there's eight. Pluto has been demoted. And what about our nine pizzas? Everyone knows my very elegant mother just served us nine pizzas. That's how we remembered the order of the planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Now, we have to come up with a new acrostic. Will mom still serve us anything? My very elegant mother just served us nothing. My very elegant mother just served us nuggets, or nuts, or nanner pudding (but we need Pluto back to make that one).

Now, every astronomy and earth science textbook is suddenly wrong, and solar system artwork around the world has to be repainted. All of those models have to drop a ball, as it were.

Sadly, Pluto didn't even make all the way around the sun before it got fired as a planet. We've only known about the little guy about 76 years and in that time it only made a third of its annual journey. The sun is so far away from it, it looks like a star in the darkness from out there. And it's freezing out there: 400 below zero in the summer.

Pluto is smaller than the earth's moon. In fact, there are seven moons in the solar system bigger than it is. To add to its embarrassment, its moon, Charon, is nearly the same size as it is.

So, last month, five hundred astronomers in Prague, Czech Republic, voted it off the show. Now, it is classified as a dwarf planet. You see, Pluto is a bit of a messy marvin; it hasn't "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." In order to be considered a planet, a body must be big enough to have cleaned other debris out of its path as it circles the sun. Pluto is inside a big comet field, the Kuiper Belt, so it got fired for not being neat enough. Let that be a lesson to all you kids out there: neatness counts.

The son of Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto in 1930, has been protesting the decision. Al Tombaugh held up a sign last week at New Mexico State University that said "size doesn't matter." Joining him are about three hundred other scientists who have signed a petition to overturn the decision.

The elder Tombaugh spotted Pluto from an observatory in Arizona because erroneous data showed there must be another planet out there. He later found his error, but not until after he found the planet and they had given it perhaps the cutest name. After all, the name was suggested by Venetia Burney, an 11-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England. Other names suggested were Cronus and Minerva. Minerva? I'm not sure we would miss it with that name. To me, the planet with the worst name is Uranus. Now, there's a bad name, but Pluto reminds us of the Disney character - Goofy's dog. I think Goofy is a dog too, so I'm not really sure how that works, but there you have it.

Pluto was actually the god of the underworld in Roman mythology (Hades in Greek). They named the planet (now dwarf planet) after him because it is so dark out there all the time.

I knew times were hard, but downsizing the solar system? And we didn't even send it an email to break the bad news, much less tell it in person. Pluto, we barely knew thee.

You can contact Craig Harris at www.apparentlyso.net.