Word: pluto
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...DeGrasse Tyson owes his colleague Michael Brown a big thank-you--and flowers wouldn't be a bad idea either. Back in 2000, Tyson, an astrophysicist and the director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, triggered an international furor when he decreed that in his prestigious establishment Pluto would no longer be listed as a planet. Henceforth, it would be considered just another ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt, a swarm of debris orbiting the sun out beyond Neptune. He was on firm scientific ground: many professional astronomers have been leaning that way for years. But people...
...July, Brown, an astronomer at Caltech, made an announcement that took the debate to a whole new plane. Along with his colleague Chad Trujillo, Brown had found something very much like Pluto, only bigger, and last month he declared that the object known officially as 2003 UB313--and temporarily nicknamed Xena--has its own little moon. Suddenly, the question Tyson had raised to make a provocative educational point became something much larger: if Pluto is a planet, then Brown's new object must be one as well...
...wonder. The solar system most of us studied in school was a deceptively simple place. There were the sun, a few asteroids and comets and, as of 1930, when Clyde Tombaugh spotted Pluto on a telescopic photograph, nine planets. Memorizing those nine names has long been a childhood rite of passage, up there with learning to tie your shoes. Yes, Pluto was always an oddball: not only is it tiny (two-thirds the size of our moon), but it has a weird, elongated orbit that is tilted at a sharp angle to the plane the other planets inhabit. Still...
Just where J.P.L.'s westward-ho push will take it next is not yet set. More missions to Mars are certain. Others to Pluto and Jupiter's moon Europa are possible. The still vague nature of these plans does not bother the veterans who know the lab best. "What we do here is try to figure out how impossible a task is and then we take it on," says Lee, a 30-year J.P.L. veteran. "The result is that we add to human knowledge. Now, can you have a better life...
DISCOVERED. A possible NEW PLANET, as yet unnamed; by scientists at Caltech, Yale and the Gemini Observatory. The researchers said the ball of rock and ice is the first object larger than Pluto to be found in the outer reaches of the solar system...