Death of a planet

Alas, poor Pluto, we hardly knew ye. It was a great 76-year run. Almost a century. But you didn’t make it around the sun even once before astronomers decided to turn their back on you.

Since the International Astronomical Union voted Thursday in Prague to remove your planetary status, the solar system somehow feels more lonely. Nine was a nice, round number. Eight just doesn’t quite cut it.

Sure, you were different from the rest of the planets. Smaller, icier, further away. And your erratic orbit put you on a different plane, sometimes closer to the sun than Neptune.

But what did it matter? You made the solar system more interesting. Without your tilted orbit, 3-D models of the solar system will once again become flat and uninteresting.

The voting at the IAU was fixed – your fate was tied to other “dwarf planets” in your new category, Ceres and 2003 UB-313 (“Xena”). Rather than include these obscure objects in the planetary club, they decided to leave you out.

So now we turn our attention to other solar system objects. Under other, more exotic names like “plutinoid,” “dwarf planet” and “scattered disc objects,” we’ve moved past our once-famed ninth planet (Pluto is so last century). Other trans-Neptunian objects like Xena await our exploration. But look on the bright side – who would have wanted a planet named after a mid-’90s television series?

Ceres, too, is an oddball in its own right, located smack dab in the middle of the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. How would a planet have made sense there? To make things even more confusing, Ceres is itself an asteroid. It’s enough to make one want to study astronomy all over again (that’s PHYS-103 to you freshmen out there).

But there is hope – only 4 percent of the IAU’s 10,000 members were present during the voting in Prague. Future meetings may yield a different result. And some scientists are saying that the Pluto-killing definition agreed upon – that a planet must clear the orbit path around it – potentially disqualifies Earth itself.

Whatever the IAU decides, I am relieved that Ceres and Xena are out. But I will always have a soft spot for that once-furthest planet that made the solar system a more fascinating place.