Humans have long been drawn to news that allows us to escape our earthly constraints. So it is that a couple recent items have piqued our interest, reminding that the universe holds secrets that extend well beyond Washington, D.C., or Olympia — and that those secrets are often more interesting than politics.
In one story, a group of NASA scientists have started a push to have Pluto re-re-classified and returned to the realm of planets. Discovered in 1930, Pluto long had been the black sheep of the planetary world, small and remote and an outlier in our solar system. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to the status of “dwarf planet,” deciding that it simply didn’t have the mass necessary to be deemed a planet.
Now, some scientists would like the IAU to amend its definition, suggesting: “A planet is 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 itsorbital parameter.” People who have the ability to translate that say it would return Pluto to the list of planets — along with more than 100 other bodies floating in space. So much for re-adopting the mnemonic “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” for memorizing the names of the planets when Pluto is included.
Meanwhile, an international group of astronomers have announced the discovery of at least seven Earth-sized planets orbiting the same star some 40 light years away. Known as exoplanets because they exist outside our solar system, the planets are tightly bunched in orbit around an ultracool dwarf star known as Trappist-1. That’s ultracool as in cold, although Trappist-1 might also be extraordinarily hip.
