Word: planet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...planet in the first place? There were high expectations that there was a planet of commensurate mass and size to Uranus and Neptune, orbiting behind Neptune. Scientists saw the path of Neptune around the sun, and they saw that it wasn't quite following Newton's laws of gravity. And so either Newton was wrong - though he'd been right for hundreds of years, so why assume that? - or there was some other mass out there that they hadn't cataloged yet that was influencing the motion of Neptune. So that was the famous Planet X. And eventually, Clyde Tombaugh...
...star just went right on by untouched. "Well, here's a closer passing one." Nothing. So for every star whose light was not blocked out, Pluto got smaller and smaller and smaller. People started getting suspicious in the 1970s and started thinking of it not as the ninth planet but as one of the vagabonds of the solar system. It was smaller than Earth's moon. There are seven moons in the solar system bigger than Pluto. That doesn't bode well if you're trying to hang out in the ranks of planets. (See pictures of the Moon...
...Pluto's day was over and it was time to rethink the structure and the form of the outer solar system. Our exhibit was that way for a year, and nobody complained about it until it showed up in the New York Times, Page One: "PLUTO'S NOT A PLANET? ONLY IN NEW YORK." That's when all hell broke loose and the hate mail started...
...Stop talking smack about Pluto or I'm going to slash your tires"? There were no threats of bodily harm. But there were tongue-in-cheek threats. And most of the schoolchildren were clearly disgruntled, pleading with me to put Pluto back where it belongs, as a planet...
What, then, are the criteria for a planet? In our exhibits, we abandoned the word planet as a useful word completely. We don't organize by planet status. We organize by what objects look like compared to what other objects look like. So we look at the family photo of the solar system, and in it, you have the sun, which obviously is its own thing. Then you have the terrestrials - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, all small, all rocky, all dense. Then you have the asteroid belt - craggy chunks of rock and metal - orbiting between Mars and Jupiter. Tens...