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I still have a t-shirt that depicts all the planets sitting at a lunch table & Pluto sitting by itself on the floor. Thanks to my younger son, it's no longer a reminder of Pluto's un-planet-ing, but instead a reminder of the time he asked "why hasn't Ceres invited Pluto to the dwarf planets' table?"

Now that the Rubin observatory is proving its worth by discovering new dwarf planets, you remember the drill for how you wanted to (very subtly) communicate here whenever the actual ninth planet shows up in the data, right?😉

Whenever I think about dwarf planets and how upset people still are about Pluto, I always think about how 'planet' is still in the name, people could just call it a planet in a colloquial way and still be (kind of) right...

People should be taught all the dwarf planets along side the planets. They are still quite interesting on their own and offer much for a primary student to learn. This isn't happening though. Ceres got a promotion from asteroid to dwarf planet, and people still know fuck-all about Ceres.

When is someone going to get around to fixing the definition of Moon?! Saturn has 293 moons and keeps on picking up more like a mangy dog at a flea circus. If Alan Shepard's golf ball finds its way into orbit, they would call it number 293. At least it would be spherical...

Pluto had to be demoted as a planet, because if a guy discovered 15 planets his school owes him a giant raise. You cannot triple the size of the solar system and then just take the automatic yearly cost-of-living adjustment.

Once you decide that planets must orbit the sun, then it may be a matter of deciding - perhaps arbitrarily- which sub-categories of large bodies should be included in the “planet” category: rocky bodies, gas giants, ice giants, and ice/rock bodies. Many Pluto fans reject this sytematic approach.

Yes, like when Vesta, Pallas and Ceres were moved from “planet” to a new category. Oh, and Pluto, 😉 but later.

I once posited to you the notion that, if Clyde Tombaugh in 1930 had the technology to see the Kuiper Belt, he would have realized Pluto was not a planet. You agreed. I still explain it to people that way. It never should have been called a planet. It was mislabeled.