Stop Picking on Pluto!

  CNN is kicking Pluto while it’s down.  Leave the poor thing alone, can’t you see that it’s had a rough year?

Poor Pluto not even the largest Dwarf Planet

Click the link to see the actual story, but allow me to quote it here:

“WASHINGTON (AP) — Pity poor Pluto, the puny former planet is facing yet another indignity.

Demoted from planethood a year ago into a new category of dwarf planet, it now turns out that it isn’t even the biggest one of those.

“This is sort of Pluto’s last stand,” joked Emily L. Schaller of California Institute of Technology, co-author of a report in Thursday’s issue of the journal Science.

When the International Astronomical Union redefined planets last year, it created the new subcategory dwarf planets, and Pluto was thought to be the largest in that group.

Planetary astronomy professor Michael E. Brown and graduate student Schaller found otherwise while studying Dysnomia, the moon of Eris, another dwarf planet.

Using the Keck Observatory and Hubble Space Telescope they were able to calculate the movement of Dysnomia and, with that information, calculate the mass of Eris at 27 percent more than Pluto. But even though Eris tops Pluto, Earth is still 360 times more massive.

“Pluto and Eris are essentially twins — except that Eris is slightly the pudgier of the two,” Brown said.

Eris, by the way, is named for the Greek goddess of, among other things, rivalry.”

Okay so maybe Pluto isn’t the biggest Dwarf Planet, but it’s still the coolest.  (as opposed to the coldest, which is probably Eris again… screw you Xena!) Pluto has three moons.  Can either of the other Dwarf Planet’s say that?  I think not.  Eris has one, and I don’t think Ceres has any.  One of Pluto’s moons is so cool that it may actually be classified as a Dwarf Planet itself one of these days.  Way to go Charon, stand up for your Dwarf Planetary System!

So how about we just stop picking on Pluto.  Give the poor rock a break for a while.  Pluto has a lot to offer us, and as soon as New Horizons gets it’s fat ass out there we’ll see that it simply kicks all kinds of ass over stupid Eris, and maybe even over some of the “real” planets.  I bet Pluto could take Mercury in a fight, no problem!

Let’s hear it for Pluto!