Monday 3 August 2015

Pluto & Reflections – WIP: 1st Aug 2015

If Pluto remained classified as a planet then these other eight worlds would have to be planets too, and there could be another thirty or forty worlds as yet undiscovered.

The last week has been one hell of a roller-coaster ride for me.  I started off at the bottom in the pit of despair (cue Mel Smith doing raspy voice) of facing another week of editing Strike Dog.  As I write this I record that I managed to edit 29,294 words, from eleven chapters, and managed to my usual couple of blogs that came to just under 700 words.  So the week ends on a high.  What a rush.  Could have done without the low though.

I did get a bit distracted by having some pieces of the puzzle of my fourth novel in the Bad Dog series click into place.  So I spent some time making notes and pulling information from my universe bible into what had been mostly a blank Scrivener document with the title Red Dogs.  As always I should add that these are working titles, who knows what the stories will be called when/if published?

Moving on I want to wade into the debate on whether Pluto is a planet or not.

I'm old, so for me Pluto has been a planet all my life and it therefore feels wrong to reclassify it as a dwarf-planet or Plutoid/Plutinoid.  However, when one looks at the evidence behind the decision to do so I can see why it was done.  The first picture explains where we are and what we know about Trans-Neptunian worlds.


However, what I find most intriguing, and an order of magnitude more important than the arguments over Pluto's status as a planet is shown in the picture above.  Pluto forms a binary system with Charon.  Unlike the Earth and Luna, where the orbit that both rotate around lies within the diameter of our planet.  Whereas the Pluto and Charon orbit around a barycenter with the other moons making Pluto unique within our Solar system.

This discovery I think more than makes up for any sentimental reasons for calling Pluto a planet.  Instead it is its own dwarf-binary system.  How awesome is that?

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