For 76 years, Pluto was the beloved ninth planet. No one cared that it was the runt of the solar system, with a moon, Charon, half its size. No one minded that it had a tilted, eccentric orbit. Pluto was a weirdo, but it was our weirdo.
“Children identify with its smallness,” wrote science writer Dava Sobel in her 2005 book The Planets. “Adults relate to its inadequacy, its marginal existence as a misfit.”
When Pluto was excluded from the planetary display in 2000 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, children sent hate mail to Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the museum’s planetarium. Likewise,
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