Educate yerself
Okay, so I really need to talk about BAMF Daddy Pluto. A while ago, my family went to an observatory on vacation where we learned about the discovery of Pluto. The thing is, that a really long time ago, a scientist named Lowell discovered Neptune and knew that there was a planet near it, though he didn't know the location--Planet X. Except that finding a planet is uber hard. Like, taking a photo of a section of sky and putting it through a machine to see if a single dot flickers or not (planets move and don't flicker, stars do.) for each dot in each photo, hard. This takes literal HOURS of staring through a telescope and collecting frames of multiple sections. The hunt for Pluto was worked on for years and then shelved, but resumed in 1929. That's when young Clyde Tombaugh came in. He was a farm boy from Kansas, hired basically as a custodian at the Lowell Observatory. This man had zero education but charted the night sky on his own. He built MULTIPLE of his own telescopes because of what a perfectionist he was. When he was hired, the scientists at the observatory handed off the project to him. After hours and hours of work, Clyde discovered Pluto. He went on to fight in WW2 go to college, and meet his future wife. But wait, there's more! As time went on, more planets were discovered in what we now know is the Kuiper belt, like Ares, etc. Problem was, there were over ten of these planets, and who wants to make elementary kids memorize all those? So revisions had to be made. To boot these planets, the new requirement to be classified as a planet was that it had to be able to be big enough to pull pieces of debris into its own orbit. Thus, Pluto and others of the Kuiper belt were classified as dwarf planets. No problem, right? Except for the fact that by these revised standards, if they were surrounded by as much debris as those in Kuiper, only TWO PLANETS IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM ARE ACTUAL PLANETS. It annoys me that Pluto is just as underestimated as its daddy was. It's long and you should probs check my facts, but I know that tumblr is a Pluto supporter and thought the story should be told.
