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| 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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