Senor Parrot's Perch

Pluto and its moon, Charon

So, what’s all this about Pluto not a planet? I know it’s old news, now, but still, it seemed so unfair to me. And look at all the stuff I thought I knew and now I don’t. I guess I’m not as smart as I thought. My fragile self-esteem is taking a beating.

But wait! There’s help out there. For those of us who like being smart, we have the library and bookstores to turn to, and an abundance of good books are out there to both smarten and cheer us up.

This all started about a started for me about a month ago. I was driving to work after dropping my kids off at school and listening to our local public radio station. The host was interviewing the astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, the author of the the book The Pluto Files. Tyson was one of the proponents for dropping Pluto from the pantheon of the planets and he told the story of the discoveries and thinking that went into the fatal vote. It was quite interesting and and the decision was well reasoned.

That got me thinking. I wanted to know more.

My first stop was the library and I found a great bunch of books varying in targeted age levels.

The first of these, 11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System, by David Aguilar, was excellent. Aimed at kids probably 3rd grade through middle school, this very well written and beautifully illustrated book proceeded through the solar system, starting with how we believe it formed, then the talked about the sun, and then tracked through each planet, their moons, meteors and asteroids.

Hey, did this book say 11 planets? Yup, it did! That’s two up from nine, and I thought we had lost one and had dropped to eight! It actually turns out that rather than declassify Pluto from planet status, we just declared a new classification of planet: Dwarf Planets, and we added Ceres, which dwells in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the incredibly distant dwarf planet Eris, navigating around the sun in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto.

More than just adding Dwarf Planets to the list, the entire solar system is reclassified to take advantage of what we know about the planets, so In fact we have three classes of planets, based on their similarities and differences:

• Terrestrial: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. These are primarily made of of rocks.
• Gas Giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. These are great planets made up of frozen gases with our a surface or ground to walk on.
• Dwarfs: Ceres, Pluto, and Eris. These are small planets, not round and covered in frozen ice. There is even some thought that Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, may itself be a dwarf planet. The two are locked into an orbit around each other and could easily be thought of as double-dwarf planets. There’s food for more thought! And these thoughts are covered more in the next book I write about.

11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System is a first-rate science book for kids. I recommend it. I’d really like to hear about more great science books for kids.

Book: 11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System
Author: David Aquilar
ISBN-13: 978-1426302367