It’s round. Big enough that it’s own gravity makes it a sphere rather than a lump of coal or a cube or some other oddly shaped object. If you were on the Star Trek Enterprise, went into orbit around this object and looked outside your view screen, this is what you’d see. You have arrived at the Planet Pluto.
Or have you?
Astronomers who “decided” Pluto wasn’t a planet but a dwarf planet, have not only disappointed generations of mankind, but were wrong.
They were wrong because a dwarf planet is still a planet, as much as a dwarf star is still a star. Indubitably.
Many people don’t know that our sun is a dwarf star. There are two kinds of dwarf stars: yellow dwarfs and the more common red dwarfs. Our sun is a yellow dwarf. Still a star, just a dwarf star. |
So just because our sun is a dwarf star doesn’t mean it’s not a star. Therefore just because Pluto is now labeled a dwarf planet orbiting around in the Kuiper Belt doesn’t mean Pluto no longer exists or that it’s s not a planet.
Another example:
Dwarf people are people. Black, white, Muslim, Hindu, Christian people. They’re all people. The operating word is the noun not the adjective. Dwarf is the adjective. Planet is the operating word. Pluto is a planet.
Proof positive. Q.E.D. Enough said. Point made. De facto verum. Just look outside at the object in the view screen. Gather the away team. We’re beaming down to the planet’s surface.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson is the public face of the non-planet Pluto moment, and I am currently reading his book. It has a chapter dedicated to why he and his consortium declassified Pluto. I too still think it is a planet, but I will read his detailed case objectively and see if he can convince me otherwise.
Reblogged this on Wayne Boyd's Rational Thinking 101.