Pluto - A big blow indeed

Sea water turns sweet, alarm on Mumbai-bound U.S. plane, the Israel-Lebanon conflict, youngsters run riot in city, encroachments, floods and hey Pluto is no more a planet. Really interesting that Pluto managed to reserve a place for itself in most of the leading news papers' Front Page. Something that it couldn't as a planet during the last 76 years.

Looks like there had been much discussion about whether Pluto, which until lately was considered the outermost planet of the solar system, should even be counted as one of the planets. And the result? It had to step down of one of the most glorious status ever of being a 'planet' only to be declared a 'dwarf planet'.

I couldn't stop digging into this more when I saw this in the headlines, probably coz of my little dream of getting into astronomy during the schooling days. Never mind. A quick look at Pluto's history would let you realise that it had been a fascinating planetary object in itself. Interestingly, Pluto proved a disappointment after its discovery, as it was much smaller and fainter than expected. The planet was initially thought to have a mass six times that of the earth which implied that Pluto was an unusually dense planet (for whatever reason that may be). All this changed in 1978, when Pluto’s satellite, Charon, was discovered. This showed that the mass of Pluto was only 1/400 of the earth making it only somewhat denser than water, much smaller than the moon in size.

Spending most of my life with computers these days, why the astronomers approved a 'new' definition of a planet that demoted Pluto to a lesser category might not make much sense to me. But Pluto ain't any IT Pro to get lethargic after a bad review. Well the number of planets has gone down by one and it's just a good news to all the kids struggling to remember the planet names during their exams. I wonder what would a site like www.nineplanets.org do, now that there are just eight of 'em? How would your little sister use your old physics text book, which in turn was borrowed from someone else a year ago?

I am not sure how upset Pluto probably is hearing the news, but just in case you are wondering if there is someone who just got frustrated, you should consider reading this.

If this is the fate of a planet, oops a dwarf planet which worked real hard circling the sun with a period of 248 years (oops!), I wonder what would be the fate of other planets going forward, hey Earth, you reading this?