Pluto (and Inzy) Under trial!
Pluto sentimentalists, guess what! Pluto is on the verge of demotion, and news reports indicate the likelihood of this happening is very high indeed! This is the subject of a ballot tomorrow, where democratically elected representatives of planet Earth (I am being sarcastic, if you didn't get it!) are going to determine whether Pluto is indeed worthy of its planetary appellation.

The story so far - Pluto was discovered in 1930 and hastily (as we know now) recorded as the 9th planet in our System. Mankind rejoiced in its brilliance and updated school books - which is what we read, and memorised.

All of that was, of course, premature - for a question bugged everyone in the know - how, goddamit, do you define a planet?

Pluto is extremely eccentric - if you follow the solar system radially outwards starting at Mercury, you come across rocky hard planets till you reach Mars and then you hit gassy giants Jupiter onwards, all with a large number of satellites and indeed, rings! And then you suddenly hit puny little Pluto - cold, tiny, hard, and with one solitary satellite, which, interestingly, is about the same size as Pluto itself (relatively speaking, on a galactic scale). And as if that were not enough, while the rest of the planets revolve around the Earth in one single plane, Pluto the deviant follows a completely different ellipse, at an angle to the rest (which has the interesting side effect that Neptune holds the record as the "farthest planet" for 20 years and then passes on the baton to Pluto for the next 200).

So Pluto is different. But is that enough to dethrone Pluto? Well, what do you know, two other bodies mysteriously appear in the Solar system, Xena and Ceres, which stake a planetary claim, similar to the irritating classmate who runs after the professor in the hope of getting an extra 0.5 marks simply because roll number 22 wrote exactly the same answer and scored more. And if you listen to Xena and Ceres' bickering, and include Charon (Pluto's mega satellite) in the bargain, then you actually have 12 planets in the system!

So, here is the conundrum - starting tomorrow, the solar system will possess 8 planets or 12 (maybe 11 - who knows?) . In either case, you will need to reorient the piece of information ingrained in your neurons for the past 25 years (estimate subject to your age) starting tomorrow, or run the risk of being labelled ignoramus.

Its your choice which way you want to go.

In the meantime, my complete support goes out to Inzamam - Darrel Hair should be fired or at least put on a performance improvement plan for the next one year.

And if you feel this post bears resemblance to this one from the NYtimes, well, I admit that was the inspiration - but this topic has been exciting me for a few days now, and so I claim this was long coming anyway!
- posted by Rallix @ 6:41 AM