Pluto... we miss you!

To me, it's still a planet.

And many planetary scientists, as opposed to astronomers, actually feel the same way. They were not the ones who voted Pluto out of planethood. It was astronomers who did that.

The fact that it has moons orbiting it, adds to its status as a proper plant! 👍

To me anything out in space that has a moon or moons is a planet.

Sorry, never gonna happen. Pluto is locked in a binary system, forever entangled with his partner. Now that he's been outed, the rest of the planets won't have him. Quite a shame actually.

Isn't Pluto a dog?

Here is the history. We have been discovering more and more objects beyond Pluto. Most of them are small, but some are of respectable size. And one in particular is bigger than Pluto.

So that prompted scientists to question the use of the word "planet". Are all of these things going to be called planets?

Everybody waited until the discoverer of Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, died. And then, the International Astronomical Union declared that to be a planet, an object must satisfy three conditions: one, it must orbit the sun; two, it must have enough mass that its gravity has shaped it into roughly spherical form (there are a lot of small asteroids out there with very weird shapes); and three, it must have enough gravity that it has swept its orbit free of orbiting debris. Pluto fails the third test.

So Pluto has been renamed a "dwarf planet". The asteroid Ceres, which is the largest of the asteroids, also became a dwarf planet.

But planetary scientists, the one who study the geography, the atmospheres, the chemistry, and the possible biology of planets, do not care about this third criterion at all. Many still call Pluto a planet.

And what about that large far-off object beyond Pluto that caused all this chaos? It has been named Eris, after the goddess of discord!

(In Greek mythology, she tossed an apple into a room with a tag on it saying "to the fairest". The goddesses Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera argued about who it should go to, and eventually that led to the Trojan War!)

I agree!

What are you talking about? Pluto still exists, doesn't it?

It's one of the most likely candidates for alien life in the solar system too due to the oceans recently discovered

Pretty sure it will be a planet again soon because of this💁

That's what started all this. Dissing Pluto.

Its doesn't feel the same

I thought it was a size thing