[GZG] Pluto.... Sort of.

Ok, it's a weird day for me..... Must be too much Pi day celebrating.....

Got the latest thinkgeek email advertisement...... And they had this at the
bottom of it. I had to pass it along. I think people here will appreciate it.

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################################ << Dear Timmy Responds
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Our mascot and resident sage, Timmy the Monkey is a fountain of wisdom. Here
he shares his advice with a smart mass in need. Would you like Timmy's helpful
advice for yourself? Send it to Dear Timmy. If we publish your email to Timmy,
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words:

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Dear Timmy,

I heard that Pluto is no longer a planet... why not? Who made that decision?

Jim from Export, Pennsylvania, USA, Earth
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Dear Jim,

This has primarily to do with the fact that the first eight planets
(with the exception of Earth, which is of course super-special) are all
Roman gods, while Pluto is a cartoon dog. Poor Pluto never really fit in with
the rest of the crowd. They let him hang around because they felt sorry for
him, but there's no denying Pluto is just... different.

Pluto has a funky orbit, for one--it constantly leaps in front of
Neptune (for 13-20 years of its 248 year trip around the sun), in a
desperate attempt to become the eighth planet. Also, while the other planets
circle around the sun in a fairly flat plane, Pluto's orbit is tilted (an
astronomer would say that Pluto's orbit is inclined 17 degrees above the
ecliptic, but that's just because astronomers feel they're not give you your
money's worth if they use a boring word like "tilted"). Plus Pluto can't
figure out if he's orbiting his moon or his moon orbits him, which makes some
astronomers call Pluto and Charon "binary planets" (not to be confused with
"binary people").

The reason Pluto finally got kicked out of the planet club, though, is because
of Eris, who you may recall is the Greek goddess of discord. Eris was
discovered in 2005, orbiting the sun out past Pluto, and she's
bigger than Pluto.  So people started to say, "if little dorky _Pluto_
is a planet, why isn't Eris one?" Frankly, the IAU (which is the
International Astronomical Union--i.e., the guys in charge of deciding
who gets in and who doesn't) was concerned about a lawsuit. So, some guys from
Uruguay submitted a proposal to IAU specifying the exact rules for who could
and couldn't be a planet. In their proposal, not only would Eris get to be a
planet, but so would Charon and Ceres (who was briefly allowed into the planet
club back in the 1800's, but then got kicked to the asteroid curb). But then
Eris tossed her golden apple into the proceedings, and the proposal got
revised, and revised again, and on the last day of voting (when most of the
sympathetic astronomers had already gone home), Pluto ended up getting kicked
out. After interviewing Pluto for its reaction, we here at ThinkGeek even
made a T-shirt about it.

The stated reason was that the IAU was worried about a whole bunch of other
"planets" getting discovered, and, you know, what good is an exclusive club if
you just let everyone in? Besides, who wants to deal with "My very educated
mother just served us nine pizzas" changing into "My very educated mother
couldn't just serve us noodle pizza, 'cause
... eewww!!"

-- Timmy