Pluto memorial haiku

[ilanarama]

Alas, poor Pluto!
Demoted to "dwarf planet" -
Sorry, Clyde Tombaugh.

New mnemonic: My
Very Elegant Mother
Just Served Us Nachos.

Comments

[malnpudl.livejournal.com]

This makes me unaccountably sad.

[thistle-chaser.livejournal.com]

My
Very Elegant Mother
Just Served Us Nachos.

Hee! Well, at least that saves poor mom's bottom. (And the "and" in "needles and pins" used to always throw me when I was a kid.)

[fredfred.livejournal.com]

Higgeldy-piggeldy
Tombaugh, Clyde W.
Found a small dot and said
"Planet! Ahoy!"

Pluto, alas, is
Naught but a dwarf and
Planetologically
Brings us no joy.

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

I love this!

[malnpudl.livejournal.com]

I adore you.

[saramwrap.livejournal.com]

Mmmmm nachos.

It's thrilling to see astronomy in the news... less thrilling to see that people are more interested in the semantics of planets than the evidence for dark matter.

:P

[nothings.livejournal.com]

excellent.

[tofty.livejournal.com]

I still use "Interplanet Janet," from Schoolhouse Rock. I'll just have to cut out the "Pluto, little Pluto, is the furthest planet from our sun" line from now on.

Or, let's see:

Mars is red
and Jupiter's big
and Saturn shows off its rings;
Uranus is built on a funny tilt, and
Neptune is its twin;

And Pluto, little Pluto, is a planetary pretender.

[laurelwood.livejournal.com]

Ah, finally. Incorporate nachos into a mnemonic and bingo! Something I can actually remember on a consistent basis! Sheer genius.

[traveller42.livejournal.com]

Sunday, 1 Oct 2006, there was a presentation in a northern suburb of Detroit on this issue. The presenter was a Vatican astronomer who was part of the process. He provided a good background on the specific issue.

The short form is that the IAU needed to determine which group would name and keep track of all the Kuiper belt objects that are being discovered. The group that tracks planets is different from the group that tracks 'minor planets'. They needed to define where that line was.

He went through the final definition and how it was produced. He then went through the details of the definition and gave arguments as to why it made sense.

Finally, the definition only applies to the IAU. What the general public calls a planet is a separate issue.