I love Pluto. I grew up entranced by this strange little world: What could you be, you rebel that doesn’t seem to follow any of the rules? I even wrote a childhood letter to a local astronomer, offering my homespun hypothesis that Pluto might be a captured fragment of an exploded star. When the New Horizons spacecraft finally revealed the true face of Pluto, I was right there at mission control in Langley, Maryland, to watch the images as they came in.
So I have a lot of sympathy for the Pluto-lovers who were wounded when the International Astronomical Union declared that the 9th planet was not exactly a planet after all, but something called a “dwarf planet.” I also appreciate the sweet irony that the fuss over Pluto’s reclassification stirred up even more interest in the New Horizons encounter. But really, the endless effort to restore Pluto’s planetary status and relegislate the definition of a “planet” is getting tedious. Time to settle this thing.
The problem, as I see it, is that people are asking multiple questions while somehow expecting only a single answer. I’m going to be a little presumptuous here and claim that there are really two answers—and that making sense of those two answers requires breaking them down even further. For you TL;DR types, here are the top-level answers to “is Pluto a planet?”
