Word: pluto
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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...
...world do 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...
...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 in Arizona discovered a planet, which got named Pluto. Not by an American, though, because an American would never have named it after a highly advertised, highly marketed laxative of the same name that was popular then...
...when did we figure out that Pluto is actually pretty minuscule? What you do is, you look at the sky chart of stars and find the day when Pluto moves to intersect the light of a star. You set up observers across the earth, and you each get a different angle of view of Pluto intersecting the light of the star. And when you do this, you can actually map the size of an object in the solar system. Here's what happened. They said, "O.K., here's a star that's going to get really close, and Pluto...
...rebuilt the Hayden Planetarium between 1997 and 2000 at great expense. There was new science that needed to go in the facility, and you want the most reliable, longest-shelf-life science you can come up with. So I called in a panel of experts on the status of Pluto. And by the end of the night, it was clear that 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...