Ten Things You Don't Know About Pluto
by Phil Plait (Bad Astronomy)
...avarice drags Pluto himself out of the bowels of the earth
-- Karl Marx
Pity poor Pluto.
Sure, it reigned as the last planet in the solar system for more than 70 years, but then it was stripped of that title by the International Astronomical Union in a manner so profoundly dumb that I'm still wondering what they were thinking. I do think that the definition of planet can be debated, and that Pluto plays its part, but the IAU really screwed the pooch with the way they did it.
Whether you call Pluto a planet, an iceball, or an animated dog, it's still a very interesting object. And today, March 13, 2009, marks the 79th anniversary of the announcement of Pluto to the world (
and in Illinois it's officially Pluto Day), so what better time to talk about it? We know a lot more about it than we did in 1930... and while you may know
some of its features, I just bet that if I listed ten of them, there may be one or two Things You Don't Know About Pluto.
What follows is my list of Plutorrific stuff about that distant iceball, the fifth in my Ten Things You Don't Know series (the others are
the Sun,
black holes,
the Milky Way, and
the Earth). The last one I did was the Sun, which keeps us warm and cozy... so let's head to the opposite end of the solar system and journey out into the deep black.