Asteroids | The Technicality that Lead to Pluto’s Justified Demotion

The discovery of the asteroid belt proved to us that it was wholly necessary for Pluto to lose its status as a planet. Pluto resides at the farthest edge of our solar system, orbiting our sun at a relative snail’s pace (one year on Pluto lasts 248 earth years). For 76 years, we shared our solar system with eight other worlds. Depending on your age, you may have grown up learning to memorise a planetary line-up that included Pluto. However, less than eight decades after US astronomer Clyde Tombaugh first sighted it in 1930, Pluto lost its status as a planet. For hundreds of years astronomers applied a very simple definition for planets. A planet, according to our oldest understanding of the concept, was any celestial object that was neither a star or our own moon. <a href="https://medium.com/@nbvonhatten/1801-astronomers-discovered-the-first-asteroid-sealing-plutos-fate-b24c0188101d">Read More</a>