Word: pluto
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...Pluto Farewell...
...planet. How about defining a planet as an object that is massive enough to be squeezed into a spherical shape by gravity, does not orbit another such object and orbits the sun in the same plane as the eight objects that we considered planets before 1930? Then Pluto and others with tilted orbits could be called planetoids. There, that was easy...
...years schoolteachers have used a version of the mnemonic phrase "My Very Eager Mother Just Sent Us New Pajamas" to help kids learn the names of the nine planets in order of distance from the sun [Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto]. Now if Pluto loses its planetary status, I suppose we can get used to "My Very Eager Mother Just Sent Us Nothing." Things just won't be the same, though, without those pajamas...
...Trujillo have even more discoveries waiting in the pipeline (they've put their logs behind a firewall to keep prying competitors away) and they're not done yet. Just about all the new worlds have been found by looking even farther outside the plane of the solar system than Pluto's orbit. "Nobody really expected to see anything way up there," says Brown. "But based on what we've found so far, we expect to find at least two or three more of these...
Tyson, ever the iconoclast, thinks the word planet should be retired entirely, not just stripped from Pluto. "You tell me something's a planet," he says, "then I have to ask you 20 more questions to figure out what it actually is." As an educator as well as a scientist, though, he is thrilled that the question of planethood has been opened for freewheeling public discussion. "The point," says Tyson, who is working on a book about the Pluto debacle, "is that the solar system is a lot more interesting than just a list of nine planets." And thanks...