Goddammit, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Pluto is a fucking planet. You ever hear of a grandfather clause? Oh, wait. That term has a racist history toward Black people. Uh, never mind. Carry on.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: February 18, 1930--
Poor, lonely, cold, distant Pluto. It was imagined decades before it was discovered. In 1840, via the use of Newtonian mechanics that I’m certain my engineer son understands and I don’t, French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier saw that Uranus was perturbed; perhaps lay off the spicy chicken wings and draft beer. The perturbations of Uranus’s orbit led to the discovery of Neptune, and about 50 years later math nerds determined Neptune couldn’t account for all of it, and they surmised a ninth planet. That math turned out to be wrong, but never mind that. They began to search in earnest for what they referred to as “Planet X.”
A wealthy Bostonian, Percival Lowell, who built the Lowell Observatory in Arizona in 1894, launched a project to find the little fucker in 1906. And they did in 1915, taking two images of it, but they didn’t realize it. Lowell died the following year and there was inheritance bullshit over the observatory and the project was sidelined for over a dozen years. Then in 1929 some 23-year-old astronomy hobbyist named Clyde Tombaugh, who, despite not yet being formally educated, impressed the Lowell Observatory with his knowledge. So, they gave him a job and said hey find this planet we’ve been looking for. And that’s what he did.
It took him less than a year of searching, but on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh proclaimed, “There is the icy little asshole.” (Paraphrased). The discovery made international headlines and suggestions for a name poured in from around the globe, with the winning suggestion coming from an 11-year-old English girl named Venetia Burney.
Clyde Tombaugh died in 1997, and nine years later the International Astronomical Union pissed on his grave. They said Pluto meets only two of the three necessary criterions to be a planet: it orbits the sun and it’s round. (Being round means it has the requisite mass to achieve such a shape). But Pluto didn’t meet the third criteria they established: having cleared its orbit of other objects. It’s not the dominant gravitational object in its orbit the way the other eight planets are. It needs to either fling them away or merge with them.
So they demoted the poor thing to dwarf planet, and since then Neil has been kind of a dick about it, insisting it was the right call. In 2015 he tweeted: “Dear Pluto, Lookin’ good. But you’re still a dwarf planet—get over it.” After 76 years of it being a planet, perhaps we should have let poor Pluto keep the designation. We grew up with Pluto being a planet. I know it’s not scientific, but maybe give us this one.
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