Guys and Dolls

*at the door to the selkie convention* good evening, ladies—allow me to take your coats

QUICK UPDATE: i am paying 182 alimony checks

wow pluto reclassification discourse is exhausting. here I thought doing a poll that highlights some of pluto's cool lesser known dwarf planet friends would put things in a context where it can't possibly go in that direction but nope a bunch people really do just hold a hard stance against a classification system entirely out of a sense of nostalgia

"the planets" aren't this exclusive club where all the astronomers' favorite celestial bodies go. the definitions used in astronomy are descriptive, they refer to the dynamics between objects and the properties they have. if you feel bad that pluto isn't considered a planet anymore and think it should be an honorary planet anyway, good news! that is literally the reason why the category "dwarf planet" was created. it's for things that don't have the same type of role in the dynamics of the solar system as the eight major planets, but are still physically a lot like little planets

palaeontology-astronomy solidarity over people interpreting changes in classification for well defined functional reasons as being some sort of bizarre value judgement of their nostalgic favourite thing and getting unreasonably mad about it.

last week when running bar trivia I had a question about what planet is the smallest in our solar system and one of the bartenders joked about like "I know the answer but I don't like it" so I took a moment when I told everyone the answers to explain that as scientists having classification criteria is important, and Pluto wasn't randomly just too small, I told them the criteria and how Pluto has not cleared the other similar size objects from the path of its orbit but that it was also the first instance of dwarf planet being used for a celestial body which I think is really cool for Pluto and now hopefully more people in the world will be able to explain why Pluto is classified as a dwarf planet!!