Tag Archives: pluto

Pluto Fanboys Hate Mail [Science]

By anthony | Published: March 10, 2010
If I were Neil deGrasse Tyson—host of the Pluto Files and director of the Hayden Planetarium—I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Not after reading the hate mail from thousands of outraged American kids. The kids wrote to de Grasse Tyson demanding an explanation about why scientists changed Pluto's classification from planet into a Kuiper Belt object . The Natural History Museum also retired it from their Solar System model, which logically got a lot of kids reaching for their pellet guns. Neil, they may sound sweet, but they are vicious, those beasts
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Pluto’s demotion is a great opportunity for science

By anthony | Published: February 10, 2010
I come to both bury Pluto, and to praise it—it being the decision to demote Pluto from the pantheon of planets. In 2006, the International Astronomical Union was faced with a growing collection of small, icy bodies similar in size to Pluto orbiting at the fringes of the solar system. It settled on a new way of defining what constitutes a planet , one that left Pluto and its peers demoted to dwarf status. The decision triggered outrage that continues unabated , and some have argued that the demotion given science a black eye from the public's perspective
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Hubble’s portrait of everybody’s favorite ex-planet

By melissa | Published: February 8, 2010
While the Hubble space telescope has provided the world with some of the most amazing images ever taken of the very edge of our universe , it has now revealed details of something much closer. The newest images, set to appear in the March issue of the Astronomical Journal , are of everybody's favorite ex-planet—now dwarf planet—Pluto. The images reveal an "icy and dark molasses-colored, mottled world that is undergoing seasonal changes in its surface color and brightness." The changes in color are believed to be the result of seasonal variations where surface ice sublimes from one pole and migrates to the other. This transformation occurred over a short, two-year period from 2000 to 2002—that's less than one percent of the total orbital period/seasonal cycle of Pluto
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