I lament Pluto's demotion, but welcome it's newfound status as the fruit of Forbidden Knowledge. Pluto and Charon are the gateway drug to binary systems, since their center of mass is well above Pluto's surface. That sounds vaguely sexist, but binary star systems are pretty common among the cosmos, and then that then introduces us to the three body problem. Pluto also was the deviant who introduced us to eccentric orbits and that there could be much, much more than gas giants beyond the asteroid belt. Pluto is the ambassador do the rest of the Oort cloud, where there lurks at least one or two massive yet undiscovered bodies that we can only theorize about because they occasionally fling stuff at us.
I lament Pluto's demotion, but welcome it's newfound status as the fruit of Forbidden Knowledge. Pluto and Charon are the gateway drug to binary systems, since their center of mass is well above Pluto's surface. That sounds vaguely sexist, but binary star systems are pretty common among the cosmos, and then that then introduces us to the three body problem. Pluto also was the deviant who introduced us to eccentric orbits and that there could be much, much more than gas giants beyond the asteroid belt. Pluto is the ambassador do the rest of the Oort cloud, where there lurks at least one or two massive yet undiscovered bodies that we can only theorize about because they occasionally fling stuff at us.
So yeah, there's no ninth planet. Nope.
But those who know, /know/.