In middle school, our teachers taught us an acronym.
Our teachers used it to assist our learning of the order of the planets. It was something along the lines of My Very Enthusiastic Mother Just Served Us Nachos. It covered the supposed "8" planets in the solar system, all the way to Neptune. Never included in this list was a P, for the ninth and final planet of our solar system, Pluto.
Pluto lost its title of a planet in 2006 when the classification of what a planet was, changed. It was considered a dwarf planet, which even though ironically has the word planet in the name, doesn't mean the same thing.
NASA specialists today even consider Pluto to be a part of the nine planets.
Although there's been much debate, there's been little change. The current list of planets in our solar system are defined as celestial bodies moving in an elliptical orbit around a star. If you use this definition, the forgotten planet of Pluto should be counted.
It deserves the title that was stripped away from it when it was not considered large enough. There isn't a size requirement to be a planet, which means that if Pluto checks all the boxes, it should be considered the 9th and final planet in our solar system.
If you ask anyone about Pluto and whether it should be considered a planet you will get one of two answers.
One- it doesn't matter and you shouldn't care about an orb floating around in space, and number two my personal favorite, it was before your time. Well, the people you ask are pretty much wrong on both accounts. Yes, Pluto's average distance from the sun is nearly four billion miles, and it takes approximately 248 years to complete one orbit.
That doesn't make it unimportant, though.
The farther away a planet is from the sun, the bigger it needs to be in order to clear its zone. If Earth circled the sun in Uranus' orbit, it wouldn't be able to clean out its neighborhood and would thus not qualify as a planet, Michael Stern said. If you use this definition, the forgotten planet of Pluto should be counted.
You can hear the debate from both sides of the argument.
There's the "little rock in space that can't be seen" or there is the planet that rightfully belongs there and deserves the title of a planet. So the choice is yours, but I would ask that you consider adding the P back to your solar system acronym.
