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Plutonized

The solar system is all screwed up, or maybe the entire universe is screwed up. There used to be nine planets. In case you don't remember them, they were, in no particular order: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto.

Now, there are eight planets because, as you will recall, scientists voted and decided that Pluto is too little to be a planet, even though Pluto has two moons to Earth's one. And Mercury doesn't have a moon, and it's small; but it's a lot closer and looks bigger than it might appear, if it were several jillion miles away just like Pluto.

So, now, scientists calling themselves astronomers and astro-physicists, have a name for what Pluto, now not a planet, is called -- Plutoid.

I ask you, what kind of name is that? Plutoid -- give me a break.

Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary tells us that "oid" is "[a] suffix or combining form meaning like, resembling, in the form of; as in anthropoid, asteroid, spheroid."

Now, there are other not-quite-planets, Plutoids, out there, which we are supposed to believe resemble Pluto -- Eris, which is bigger than Pluto but farther away from the sun, and Makemake, which is smaller than Pluto, but dimmer and outside Neptune's orbit, and Ceres, which was an asteroid, but is now a Plutoid (which, I understand, does not please Ceres lovers because it was once the biggest asteroid, but is now the tiniest Plutoid).

Pluto has been like totally fucked over by the changing nomenclature. Plutonized, so to speak.

But there's more bad news on the Plutonian front; three "planets" have actually been seen circling a star called HR8799 130 light years away from Earth -- and Pluto, for that matter -- by some astronomers or astro-physicists. And a mere 25 light years away, a "planet" circling a star called Formalhaut was visualized. Usually, scientists deduce the presence of planets -- 300 of them, as of this writing -- going around and around stars by detecting little wobbles in the stars' rotation, which means that something is pulling on the stars, which something is hypothesized to be planets.

These new "planets" are mere specks detected among points of light in the sky. Pluto gets totally fucked over again. Must scientists denigrate Pluto any more than they already have by designating these things that they think they see "planets?" Why not call them by the name scientists already use, planetoids, since scientists seem to believe that these things resemble planets, but don't really know?

Here's the thing. These astronomers and astro-physicists think they know everything -- they announce these discoveries, as if science is the answer to all of the questions in the universe. For all these pesky scientists know, these things they have seen, these tiny specks they think they see and define by Earthly points of reference, could be gigantic, sentient space beings that have simply congregated around a heat source in the cold vastness of outer space to warm up before leaving again on their journeys to other points of light in the universe, searching for other intelligent beings.

That could be true, you know. And, in their travels, they might just chance upon that star 93,000,000 miles away from us and discover teeny, tiny little things moving around on the surface of the third satellite orbiting the star.

Posted by Bill at November 19, 2008 11:17 PM