Word: planetful
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...Once a planet, now a dwarf, Pluto has lodged itself in the American consciousness for three-quarters of a century. Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of New York City's Hayden Planetarium, explores the little guy's allure in his new book The Pluto Files. He talked to TIME about demoting a planet, how he became one of America's best-known scientists and how science will fare in the Obama Administration...
...Plutophiles, which you make a pun on in your book title, even exist? What's so special about Pluto? All Plutophiles are based in America. If you go to other countries, they have much less of an attachment to either the existence or preservation of Pluto as a planet. Once you investigate that, you find out that Disney's dog Pluto was sketched the same year the cosmic object was discovered. And Pluto was discovered by an American. So here you have a recipe for Americans falling in love with a planet that really is just a tiny ice ball...
...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...
...effort - even greater cooperation and understanding between nations. We will begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people, and forge a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan. With old friends and former foes, we will work tirelessly to lessen the nuclear threat, and roll back the specter of a warming planet. We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast...