Poor Pluto, i hardly knew ye, if only u had been noteworthy like Mars or Jupiter
Lets pay a tribute to the soon to be forgotten one
Pluto – Roman God of the Underworld(not to be confused with the Disney dog)
Title: God of the Dead
Greek name: Hades
Relations: Son of Saturn
Brother of Jupiter and Neptune
Husband of Proserpine
Solar system: planet Pluto
English words: Plutonium
Pluto was the god of the Dead. When someone died, they travelled down to the Underworld. First, they had to cross the River of the Dead, called the Styx. Everyone was buried with a coin, to pay the ferryman, Charon. Then they had to get past Cereberus, a fierce dog with three heads, which would only let the Dead through. Finally they had to come before the Judges of the Dead.
The moon of planet Pluto is called Charon.
The metal Plutonium is radio-active. It was discovered at the same time as the planet Pluto. It is not only used for nuclear bombs, it is deadly by itself. It deserves to belong to the god of Death.
Pluto sometimes got confused with the Greek god, Plutus, the god of wealth. This is not surprising, since the names sound alike, and also wealth, like gold, silver or jewels, are found underground, where Pluto ruled
Mythological names were much to the fore: Cronus and Minerva (proposed by the New York Times, unaware that it had been proposed for Uranus some 150 years earlier) were high on the list. Also there were Artemis, Athene, Atlas, Cosmos, Hera, Hercules, Icarus, Idana, Odin, Pax, Persephone, Perseus, Prometheus, Tantalus, Vulcan, Zymal, and many more. One complication was that many of the mythological names had already been allotted to the numerous asteroids. Virtually all the female names had been used up, and male names were usually reserved for objects with unusual orbits.
The name retained for the planet is that of the Roman god Pluto, and it is also intended to evoke the initials of the astronomer Percival Lowell, who predicted that a planet would be found beyond Neptune. The name was first suggested by Venetia Burney, at the time an eleven-year-old girl from Oxford, England. Over the breakfast table, one morning her grandfather, who worked at Oxford University’s Bodleian Library, was reading about the discovery of the new planet in the Times newspaper. He asked his grandaughter what she thought would be good name for it. Venetia thought that as it was so cold and so distant it should be named after the Roman God of the underworld. This idea was mentioned by her grandfather to a former Astronomer Royal who cabled his astronomer colleagues in America. After favourable consideration which was almost unanimous, the name Pluto was officially adopted and an announcement made by Slipher on May 1, 1930
Little is known about Pluto because of its great distance from Earth and because no exploratory spacecraft have visited Pluto yet. In 2001, NASA approved preliminary studies for a mission called “New Horizons” to Pluto, to be conducted by the Southwest Research Institute. Its launch window is between 11th January and 14th February 2006. Assuming it launches within the first 23 days of the window, it will benefit from a gravity assist from Jupiter, and arrive at Pluto in July 2015.
It will weigh half a ton and will travel at speeds reaching 43,000 km/h (27,000 mph). The spacecraft would use a remote sensing package that includes imaging instruments and a radio science investigation, as well as spectroscopic and other experiments, to characterize the global geology and morphology of Pluto and its moon Charon, map their surface composition and characterize Pluto’s neutral atmosphere and its escape rate. The mission plan also calls for a flyby of Kuiper Belt Objects by 2022.
“Save Pluto” websites sprang up, and school children sent letters to astronomers and the IAU.On February 3, 1999, Brian Marsden of the Minor Planet Center inadvertently fueled the debate when he issued an editorial in the Minor Planet Electronic Circular 1999-C03 noting that the 10,000th minor planet was about to be numbered and this called for a large celebration (the IAU celebrates every thousandth numbered minor planet in some way). He suggested that Pluto be honored with the number 10,000, giving it “dual citizenship” of sorts as both a major and a minor planet.
Between the media reports and the Minor Planet Electronic Circulars, IAU General Secretary Joannes Anderson issued a press release that same day, stating there were no plans to change Pluto’s planetary status. Eventually, the number 10,000 was assigned to an “ordinary” asteroid, 10000 Myriostos
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/pluto_habitable_030520.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3052467.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4396546.stm
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/060824_planet_definition.html
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=0009D736-1E25-1CD4-B4A8809EC588EEDF
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2306945.stm
Earth’s Moon Could Become a Planet
By Robert Roy Britt
Senior Science Writer
posted: 17 August 2006
06:32 pm ET
If astronomers approve a newly proposed planet definition next week, things could get really strange. Sure, asteroid Ceres will become a planet. Pluto’s moon Charon will become a planet.
But we’re talking really strange.
Eventually, if Earth and its Moon survive long enough, the Moon will have to be reclassified as a planet, said Gregory Laughlin, an extrasolar planet researcher at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
The new definition, proposed this week by the International Astronomical Union (IAU), basically says every round object orbiting the Sun is a planet, unless it orbits another planet. But there is a big caveat: If the center of gravity, called the barycenter, is outside the larger object, then the smaller object is a planet. That wording elevates Pluto’s moon Charon to planethood, an idea some astronomers have criticized.
But here’s the thing. Earth’s Moon was born in a catastrophic collision more than 4 billion years ago. It started out very close to the planet but has been moving away ever since. It’s currently drifting away about 1.5 inches (3.74 centimeters) every year.
For now, the system’s barycenter is inside Earth. But that will change.
“If the Earth and Moon do survive, then the barycenter will eventually move outside the Earth as the Moon recedes,” Laughlin told SPACE.com. “At that point the Moon would be promoted to planetary status.” [What would we call it?]
None of this would occur for a few billion years. And Earth and the Moon would have to survive a host of remote catastrophe scenarios along with the predicted swelling of the Sun into a red giant, which Laughlin and others have previously said might engulf and vaporize our planet (unless we can figure out a way to move it).
Other astronomers have noted that it is possible there are three-object systems yet to be found in the outer solar system. If they are all round and have that certain barycenter thing happening, then they’d be called triple planets under the new definition.
It gets stranger.
Astronomers expect to find hundreds of Pluto-sized objects in the outer solar system. If one has a satellite that is round, and which has a certain eccentric orbit—meaning the two objects come very close together at one point and then diverge greatly—then the barycenter could dip inside the larger object during part of the orbit, Laughlin explained.
In such a case, the smaller object would be defined as a moon part of the time and a planet the rest
And thats enough i need to know, in case my grandkid asks me in the future, hey whatever happened to Pluto, i am up to date