Scientists want to make Pluto a planet again, and we are *so* on board with this
Positive space news is always welcome around these parts, so here goes: Scientists want to make Pluto a planet again, and we are so on board with this. Ya know, Pluto losing its planet status never did sit well with us. It meant a huge portion of our grade school science education was officially obsolete, which makes us feel about as ancient as The Milky Way Galaxy. Not cool, science.
Anyway, there’s been talk of reinstating the icy dwarf sphere’s official planet classification since 2015, when the New Horizons spacecraft did a Pluto flyby and sent back extremely detailed images that scientists hoped would put the kibosh on all this “not a planet” nonsense.
Plus there is a literal image of Pluto the dog on the former planet’s surface, which is reason enough to give it back its rightful spot among the other major sun orbiters.
Unfortunately, that still hasn’t happened. But, there’s still hope. According to Gizmodo, scientists aren’t ready to give up the fight for Pluto just yet, which makes us extremely happy.
Alan Stern, principal investigator of the New Horizons Pluto mission, is leading the charge, along with a team of NASA scientists who came up with a new definition for planet that aims to give the International Astronomical Union (IAU) no choice but to welcome Pluto back into the planetary fold.
In the proposal Stern’s team submitted to the IAU, a planet is described as:
"a sub-stellar mass body that has never undergone nuclear fusion and that has sufficient self-gravitation to assume a spheroidal shape adequately described by a triaxial ellipsoid regardless of its orbital parameters."
Um, yeah…what they said. We take that extensive, inclusive definition to mean that scientists *really* want Pluto back in the planetary lineup, and we can’t wait to see if their efforts are successful.
