Demoted Pluto Proves 9 is the Loneliest Number
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By KHALID MOSS  Although I'd been warned by some bushyhaired astrophysicist on The Today Show, the news late last month hit me like a runaway meteorite. Astronomers say Pluto is no longer a planet.   I guess when it comes to planetoids, size does matter.
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By Michael Stroh< The Baltimore Sun  Call it a mugging in the Milky Way.   In a stunning reversal, astronomers who were ready to expand the solar system's number of planets by three just last week voted to shrink it Thursday instead, stripping Pluto of its status as a planet.
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NASA's New Horizon's space probe was pointed toward Pluto and the frozen, sunless reaches of the solar system on a nine-year journey after getting a gravity boost Wednesday from Jupiter.
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Until recently, they were able only to detect the presence of planets equivalent in size to our own neighboring gas giant Jupiter.
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Books-A-Million falls short and points to the sky.
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NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted a dusty disc of material around a very small "failed star" called a brown dwarf, raising the possibility that there may be miniature solar systems in which planets orbit objects not much larger than planets, scientists said Monday.
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No word on how they were lost NASA's Spitzer observatory has logged more than 1,000 previously unknown dwarf galaxies hiding out in a giant cluster of galaxies.â¦
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Pinning down a prophet is lonely work. Just ask Mohave County, Arizona, investigator Gary Engels.
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This analog clock has a twist: the only number appearing on the clock face is nine, but it's calibrated correctly once you do the math.
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This Nasa image shows Saturn&#39;s lonely moon Mimas (R) seen against the blue-streaked backdrop of Saturn&#39;s northern hemisphere.
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A team of astronomers announced last week the discovery of some of the smallest planets yet detected beyond our solar system. The two newly discovered planets represent a new class of extrasolar planets, and
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Astronomers write a new definition that officially makes Pluto a planet. But that means 2003 UB313 is one too
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European scientists have discovered what they describe as the smallest Earth-like planet orbiting a star outside of our Solar System.
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By Contra Costa Times, Walnut Creek, Calif.  Sep. 5--FOR THE PAST 76 years, Pluto has been an impostor, posing as one of the nine planets in our solar system.
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The IAU's recent decision to retain Pluto as a planet was a political attempt to catch up with two trends: the recent discoveries by Mike Brown and his colleagues of new planetary objects, and a growing unease about Pluto's place in the classical notion of what a planet is. Whether or not they made the right decision about Pluto is rather pointless, as there are certainly more important things astronomers have to worry about. Although it is controversial amongst astronomers. And think of those poor astrologers and their horoscopes: "Your Libra is in the House of Quaoar. So, um, that makes you very cold and distant?"  If Pluto gets called a Planet or a Pluton or a Salami Sandwich in children's textbooks just isn't that important in the larger scheme of things. So certainly, the IAU got it right, for now: just let popular and historical notions hold sway. However, the IAU did not address a third trend on the horizon: we are beginning to discover planets outside of our solar system. This means our traditional notion of what a planet is and isn't is about to be challenged in a whole new bunch of ways that Pluto and Mike Brown could never muster. We are going to be exposed to a whole new cornucopia of exotic objects orbiting other stars in the next few decades. In this regard, the IAU's recent Solar Sytem-centric and politically rendered decisions just don't cut it.
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Tycho:  I uploaded the comic early, as many of you noticed.  I entered the wrong number in the update field.  You may also have noticed that the spelling in these posts has really gone to hell.  So, that's numbers and letters.  I hope to one day discover a set of pictograms with which I can manage some baseline fucking proficiency.
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By ALICIA CHANG  LOS ANGELES - A distant, icy rock whose discovery shook up the solar system and led to Pluto's planetary demise has been given a name: Eris.