Alas Pluto is no more. I remember as a teenager reading 'The Search for Planet X' , one of those cheap Ashton Scholastic novelettes. It charted the efforts of Clyde, or Clive, Tombaugh (I think thats right?) a young astronomer who was certain that something was tugging at Neptune. I mean, gravitationally. And he was right. Enter tiny Pluto, the ninth planet.
I guess something about Pluto has always been a little odd. It doesn't have its own exclusive orbit around the sun. It's very tiny compared to the 4 interior gas giants and is even smaller than the Earths moon. Speculation persisted that it was an escaped moon. It was really a little like the odd one out.
But in the collective, if uninformed, imagination of the public, it was a distant and slightly cute entity marking the supposed boundary of the solar system. Alas its neither cute (the surface being entirely hostile to life) and it is far from being at the edge of our solar system. Nowhere near it, in fact.
Having said that Pluto, while losing its status in one regard, gains another. Its is now king of the dwarfs. There are worse fates surely.
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