This week, the planet Pluto was eliminated from the list of planets by the International Astronomical Union. We now have only eight planets orbiting the sun. Clyde Tombaugh discovered the so called planet in 1930 at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff Arizona. Now you can forget that.
To be considered a planet it should be a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a nearly round shape and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit. Pluto is taken off the list because its oblong orbit overlaps Neptunes.
The International Astronomical Union also declared that this whole thing is the fault of George Bush. He was responsible for the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center, Hurricane Katrina and Global warming. Now, “because of his inept administration we must eliminate Pluto as a planet,” a spokesman for the Union said. The spokesman for the group also said that “ Bush somehow got the notion that Osma bin Laden was hiding on Pluto and demanded that our group vote to disregard it as a planet thereby eliminating his hiding place.”
In any event, we now only have eight planets and this should make it easier for the school kids to learn eight rather than nine.