Happy Pluto Day

Today is the 79th anniversary of when Pluto was first observed on Earth by Clyde Tombaugh. It was thought to be the mysterious Planet X which seemed to be tugging on Neptune and Uranus. According to an article on This Day in History, some astronomers doubted that Pluto had enough mass to do that, but in 1978, when its moon Charon was discovered, it looked like their combined mass was enough to cause the effects on the two large planets.

You probably know that the International Astronomical Union officially demoted Pluto from being a full-fledged planet but I and many other people (and many astronomers) disagree with this. An interesting blog dedicated to Pluto can be found at Laurel's Pluto Blog. It's written by an amateur astronomer who is an entertaining writer and has a passion for Pluto's being reinstated as a real planet. The picture here is from the Hubble Space Telescope. We should know a lot more about Pluto and its moons (yes, they've discovered more) around July 14, 2015 when the NASA probe New Horizons reaches Pluto.