Let's Meet the New Planets

Let's Meet the New Planets

by Ice Cream Jonsey

CHARON Charon was long considered the only moon of Pluto. The kind of person that you became absolutely sick of on Wikipedia is really concerned with Pluto not being a planet any longer and thought the discussion currently going on was finally going to put an end to the nonsense. So finding out that Charon and Pluto will become a double planet is going to kill this guy. He's pissed. Can a planet actually make you angry? Of course not. You're making a good living, you have a girlfriend or several girl friends, you're together, your life is in order. You're not wrapped up into this shit too much. Not Demote-Pluto Guy. He's fucking losing it right now. He's checking Orbitz for the cheapest flight to this conference so he can blow it up.

RATING: A. You wouldn't think that 2,500 astronomers met in order to troll some sniveling weasels, but... well...

CERES Ceres is the biggest and "first" asteroid within our asteroid belt. At one point Ceres was considered a planet in its own right, but mankind then learned of all the garbage floating around in the space between Mars and Jupiter and it was demoted. I had honestly never heard of Ceres until a couple of weeks ago. It's amazing how easy it is to completely remove all reference and knowledge to something like a possible planetary body. If they could erase Ceres from the text books, what chance does ZPC, Mysterio and the New Orleans Saints have? Then again, I went to public school, so. I've attached what seems to be the most famous picture of Ceres. I guess there is a craft flying out its way, but the biggest and most round asteroid receives all the respect that the winner of the N.I.T. tournament gets. Congratulations, you're the 66th best college basketball team in America. The Homo Prancing Band in Yar's Revenge was better depicted than every image of Ceres we have.

RATING: C+. We're never going to land there, it should never have been deigned an asteroid in the first place but it was so there are no pics and the Ur-Quan masters are (spoiler) going to blow it up in a few hundred years.

2003 UB313 The biggest Kuiper object found so far, the guy who found it decided to colloquially call it "Xena." Har har har! Then he called its moon "Gabrielle." Jesus Christ. Career ending decision for astronomers in general and it's a good thing you can be taught this stuff rather than simply inherit it, because solar system people now occupy the lowest rung of the nerd ladder thanks to this one. Them calling UB313 this was, then, a great day for LARPers, enthusiasts of Dragon Dice and webmasters of snotty gaming sites.

RATING: F. The least popular object in the solar system right now, possibly ever. It's a good thing it has a methane atmosphere, because this is where mankind will be dumping its shit in the next millennium.

VULCAN Not the Star Trek planet, but the hypothosized intra-Mercurial world. Guys have been claiming to see this one for years, as recently as 1971. People would wait until there was a solar eclipse and then stare as intently as possible with their naked eyes, looking for Vulcan. They would claim that they saw a "spot" in a particular location and the legend of Vulcan would live on. I am not a trained scientist or anything, but I think I figured out why these guys were seeing spots when they looked at the Sun, not at the Sun.

RATING: A+. Science has come a long way.

About the author: Ice Cream Jonsey likes that line that Oscar Wilde said about having to get off the planet, if only for a moment.