Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

This weekend at a Labor Day event, my friend Tim Miller hauled out our telescope to attempt to show the crowd the sun (through the appropriate filters, of course!) and I hung around. The clouds got in the way mostly, so instead of looking at the sun, most people asked me about Pluto’s recent and controversial declassification as a planet. Here’s my take:

It makes no difference to me whether Pluto is a planet, or a dwarf planet, or a planetoid, or a pluton, or anything else. It’s still a very real object that’s very much out there and very much deserves to be studied, whatever its classification. Frankly, the whole debate strikes me as academics arguing about academic things. Whatever the outcome, the politics of astronomy may be changed, but the science of Pluto will not.

Besides, there are more important things that deserve astronomers’ attention, such as Adams’s First Law, which I understand is becoming popular among people who don’t have a board up their ass.