I was recently reminded that I simply do not understand the emotional attachment that people had to Pluto as a planet. It's another dinky ball of ice in the Kuiper Belt! I don't want to get caught up in semantics, but we should at least lump it in with similar objects in terms of composition and formation.
But I have a serious question here: is the attachment to Pluto a symptom of bad science education in this country? Have we failed at conveying that science is a system of inquiry, and not just a list of facts?
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Take a look at the title of the next departmental colloquium:
NASA's Pluto-Kuiper Belt Mission: The First Mission to the Ninth Planet And the Solar System's Third Zone
Seems NASA can't quite let go of the "planet" status either.
But Pluto was a planet when the New Horizons probe was launched! And to be fair, NASA now refers to plutoids: http://tinyurl.com/cllunp
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