Thursday, August 17, 2006

"Don't Mess with Mother Nature"

I am on my soap box again! One of my pet peeves is how the terminology keeps changing for instance, in the "olden" days when somebody stole money they were called a thief. Now for some reason its been changed to an embezzler i.e. A Planet is a planet not a pluton. Webster defines a pluton as any body of igneous rock that solidified FAR BELOW the earth's surface. The only connection is that is was named after Pluto.

Well they have gone to far now that they are messing with the planets!! It seems the leading astronomers have decided to relabel some of our planets and at the same time to redefine others as set forth in a draft resolution to be presented to the International Astronomical Union (the arbiter of what is and what isn't a planet) . The new planetary lineup would include 2003 UB313 (nicknamed Xena), farthest-known object in the solar system; Pluto's largest moon, Charon; the asteroid Ceres, which was considered a planet in the 1800s.

The panel has proposed a new category of planets called "plutons", referring to Pluto-like objects in the Kuiper Belt, a disc-shaped zone beyond Neptune containing thousands of comets and planetary objects. Pluto itself and two of the potential newcomers Charon and 2003 UB313 would be plutons.

Would this mean all of our school books used to teach astronomy would then be outdated?

I am going on record this minute and telling Pluto not to worry, he will always be a planet to me!!

Bright Eyes may have to re-learn astrology to know what to call each of these new fangled objects.

2 comments:

GEM said...

wI thought Pluto was Mickey Mouses Dog. Isn't a pluton some part of a sentence structure like a noun or adjective. The way my memory is going lately, I wouldn't know if something was renamed or misnamed. Sometimes I just call it somethine entirely different, you know, like that other planet, Jupenter.

Ger said...

ROFL...If I didn't have to worry about drug tests i think i'd need to stop in and sample ya'lls water.