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Thursday, February 04, 2010

Galactic Humiliation

This is interesting:

Newly released Hubble Space Telescope photos show the distant one-time planet — demoted to "dwarf planet" status in 2006 — is changing color and its ice sheets are shifting.

The photos, released by NASA Thursday, paint a Pluto that is significantly redder than it had been for the past several decades. To the layman, it has a yellow-orange hue, but astronomers say it has about 20 percent more red than it used to have.

Clearly, the poor dwarf planet is blushing. What do we expect after calling it a planet and then pulling that recognition away?

I think politeness calls for us to turn our telescopes away from Pluto and let it get over the humiliation of it's embarrassment alone.