As a child, you learn a great number of things about the world that seem unchangeable. For example: There are 4 seasons to a year, 24 hours to a day, 50 states in this country, and seven continents on this planet. These are tiny pieces of important information that we tuck away in our pocket and use as the foundation for much of our future knowledge. We will not have to go back and reevaluate this. It just is.Yet this past week at the California Academy of Science’s planetarium, I was reminded of how 2 years ago one such assumption was pretty much destroyed. Anyone who grew up after the 30s knew the solar system contained 9 planets. We’ve memorized their names, created mnemonic devices to remember their order from the sun, and wrote stellar reports on them when in grade school (well, I can’t speak for yours, but mine… the teacher ran out of gold stars after reading it).
Suddenly (unless you were an astronomer or avid magazine reader), Pluto got 86ed. “Not big enough to be a planet,” they said. For those of us who may have been a bit on the scrawny side when we were younger, this felt personal. Apparently, if Pluto was a planet, then a number of other larger objects in the solar system had to be classified as planets too. Things were about to get very crowded. So to head this off, Pluto went from “planet” to “dwarf planet.” You could either see this as Pluto being demoted, or valiantly taking it for the team.
But this leads to some important questions: Are Scorpios suffering from inferiority complexes now that the ruler of their astrological sign got publicly shamefaced? Is the god of the Roman Underworld miffed since he is now the namesake of a piece of space debris as opposed to a planet? And what exactly did my very educated mother just serve us nine of?
posted by jw
