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Snoop Dogg |
Pluto iz so a planet,
yo. You wanna tell
my 3rd grader and
every textbook in the
world that they gots
to redizzle the solar
sizzle just cuz some
old dudes and maybe
one lady said so at a
meeting in Prague?
That ain't right. That's just bad astrofizzo.
And besides, they just discovered Pluto has 2 new
moons! Now maybe I smoked a little too much hizzle
dizzle back in the fizzle dizzle, but when you gots
as many moons as I got jzoints ready to go, you iz a
planet, fo shizzle.
So for reals now, Clyde Tombaugh spotted the thing
back in nineteen thirty 'fo or something. Fucking wit'
old ass shit only means trouble. Grandfatha tha
muthafucka in. That's all I gots to say. |
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Eminem |
Pluto is clearly just the largest,
brightest, closest, Kuiper belt
object, which accounts for its
early detection. It lacks the
gravitational radius to sweep
out material intersecting its
own orbit, and it only holds
onto its atmosphere for a small
part of its journey arond the
sun. If we included objects like
Pluto, which are merely large enough to become
spherical under their own gravity, then we would
need to add upwards of two hundred new objects to
the list of planets. In my professional opinion, this
would rob the definition of the word “planet” of most
of its explanatory power.
In some sense, all such definitions are arbitrary, and
as scientists, we have to draw the line somewhere.
We simply can't let our own personal historical bias
get in the way of much needed progressive advances
in astrophysical nomenclature. HSP |
Issue 12
