NOVA shares some of the “hate mail” sent by children to Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, after Pluto was demoted from a planet to a comet. What’s interesting about this collection of letters is “how their tone shifted over the years, as the public slowly came to accept Pluto’s fall from planethood.” EXCLAMATION!
[Via]
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learn to spell kid! EPIC FAIL!!!
First, Pluto was never demoted to a comet. It was demoted to a newly-created category called “dwarf planet” by the IAU, which then proceeded to state that dwarf planets are not planets at all but a separate category altogether. It should be noted that the IAU’s controversial demotion of Pluto is very likely not the last word on the subject and in fact represents only one interpretation in an ongoing debate. Only four percent of the IAU voted on this, and most are not planetary scientists. Their decision was immediately opposed in a formal petition by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. Stern and like-minded scientists favor a broader planet definition that includes any non-self-luminous spheroidal body in orbit around a star. The spherical part is important because objects become spherical when they attain a state known as hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning they are large enough for their own gravity to pull them into a round shape. This is a characteristic of planets and not of shapeless asteroids and Kuiper Belt Objects. Pluto meets this criterion and is therefore a planet.