My Very Educated Mother Just Showed Us Nine Planets

Are you wondering what the title of this post means? Many people around the world, according to this news, uses this weird looking sentence as a way to remember the order of the planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Though, when I was a kid, I never used it; I never knew about it. I had hard time, as a student of primary standards in my school, in remembering these names, in the same order. But, there is something more weird happening in the world astronomers' circles. Recently, there was held a 2 week conference of astronomers from all over the world to the christening ceremony of a newly found object in the outer space! Apparently, scientists are split in their opinion of calling it by their dear names…If this is not funny, what else is?

Well, not exactly…the actual confusion is whether to call it as a planet or just one other among those numerous things found in the outer space. I can’t understand (and probably never will) the significance of this “bright, rocky object officially known as 2003 UB313” to call it by a name. Who cares, what it is called? There are millions of objects out there, which don’t have a name and imagine the situation if hundred thousand astronomers all over the world, split themselves in naming each one of them…

Fortunately for us, the astronomers are worried only about the planets. One section is ridiculing that if the other insists on ‘calling’ this object as a planet, they will ‘call’ some others too as planets. This way the number of planets can become as much as 53. Otherwise, don’t dare call the newly found thing as a planet, they warn. This sounds like a real petty quarrel of a few hundred thousand responsible adults, who are dubbed as scientists. Even if they succeed in creating these 53 planets, none of them will really lose the fight, but the primary school kids will, who have to remember the names of all those unseen things, to get a couple of marks in their class tests!

Read on this interesting article…