Pluto

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Hello and welcome.

Citation Needed, a podcast where you choose a subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia, and pretend we're experts.

Because this is the internet, and that's how it works now.

I'm Heath, and I'm joined by four heavenly bodies who all spend plenty of time on the elliptical.

Cecil, Noah, Tom, and Eli.

All right, the only thing heavenly about my body is that it's high.

Yeah, I actually, I used to use the ellipticals at planet fitness, but now it's just fitness.

Nicely done.

Nicely done.

They told me I had to stop yelling we on the machines, but I told them that was the whole point.

Yeah, no.

All right.

Noah, what person, place, thing, concept, phenomenon, or event are we going to be talking about today?

Pluto.

Excellent.

So what is Pluto?

It's the largest dwarf planet in the solar system, and it's my vote for the cutest of the known heavenly bodies.

It's the ninth largest, but only 10th most massive object that directly orbits the sun.

It has five known moons, a 248-year periodicity, a highly elliptical orbit, and though it doesn't have an actual heart, it has something similar enough to that that it would be illegal to abort it in Texas.

A gun.

Okay, Greg Abbott just put a bounty on all of us.

This is not right.

Right?

Because, all right, the first thing that we have to talk about is this whiny-ass thing people do where they try to insist that Pluto is still a planet.

So, with all these apologies,

write to all these misguided Pluto lovers.

Hey, guys, you're loving Pluto wrong.

It's not that it used to be a planet and it got demoted.

It's that it was misidentified in 1930 and it took us 76 years to admit it.

Right?

Like if you see Cecil from across the room and you're like, why, that's rock and roll legend Dave Grohl.

But then upon getting a closer look, you realize that it's Cecil.

Cecil didn't get demoted to be in fucking Cecil.

He was Cecil the whole time.

You just misidentified him.

No, no, no.

Noah, it's like I spent my childhood being told to remember that Cecil is Dave Grohl.

And then I was taught mnemonics like my very educated mother just served us nine Cecils.

And then some science nerd was like, oopsie, so he whoopsie changed my worldview.

No, you changed the definition of planet, you nerd.

No, you fucking logical.

Now Pluto isn't a sneeze-snaw or whatever new word you already use if you told me to learn it.

Okay, here's the girl who got upgraded to Cecil.

That's what fucking happens.

All right, right.

So, but here's okay.

Here's the problem with that, Eli.

And to explain it, I need to stick with the Dave Grohl analogy a little bit longer because, look, I love Cecil to death.

I'd give a kidney for the guy.

Not one of mine, but I'd get one.

I have ways.

Thank you for your wishful resourcefulness.

No one.

If you want one, let me know.

This is not restricted to medical emergencies.

I got a guy.

And Cecil is genuinely one of the coolest guys I know, but he's not fucking rock star cool.

Right.

And if you think

podcast, whatever.

But no, but look, if you think Cecil's a rock star and you start comparing him in coolness to all the other rock stars, he's going to come up short, right?

He'll be the least impressive rock star.

But once you realize your mistake and you place him in his proper category, say guys named Cecil or people who regularly listen to Joe Rogan, he suddenly skyrockets to the top of the cool rankings.

That's what happened to Pluto.

Hey, Cecil, I'm sorry Noah couldn't possibly explain how Pluto's not a planet without spending a paragraph on how lame you are.

It wasn't about how lame, it was about how clean he wasn't.

Noah, you could just say, Hey, welcome back, Cecil.

These other guys are miserable and never laugh at anything.

That's okay, too.

Hey, come on, Tom does.

It's true.

Eli, did you want to laugh real quick or no?

Do you ever see it?

This is one of Eli's like sad boy laughs where he's like,

you have to edit it out because it just sounds mean.

You do, because it sounds mean.

It sounds mean.

Yes.

Yeah.

All right.

So, so yeah, but it was never a fucking planet.

And what's more, that's been very obvious for quite a while.

The first hint was that it crosses the orbit of a fucking planet.

It's also significantly smaller than our moon.

And if those weren't clues enough, and they were, in 1992, we discovered a second object following Pluto's same basic orbit and another in 1993.

But before we would reclassify Pluto, we would have to discover 42 more.

And today we know about something like 3,000 of them.

Right.

So the point is that I remember having conversations with my brother about how planetary Pluto wasn't when I was 10.

When the writers of the Jim Carrey comedy, me, myself, and Irene, needed a convenient conversation for super geniuses to be having, They went with, it's silly to call Pluto a planet.

That movie came out in 2000, and it was already a tired cliche by then.

Yeah, and remember, if you can't trust Jim Carrey.

Well, okay, you can't trust Jim Carrey.

Seriously, Jim Carrey's a fucking idiot.

No, true.

Yeah, I'm not going to trust Jim Carrey.

Wear a mask.

I don't even think they work, but wear a mask.

In fact, and I find this really interesting.

Pluto is not even the first misidentified non-planet to get this treatment, right?

So on New Year's Eve of 1801, a Sicilian astronomer named Gippi Piazzi discovered a world nestled between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

He announced that he discovered what would have then been the eighth known planet.

He named it Ceres, and it was pretty big, right?

Like more than a third as big as Pluto, at least.

But a few decades later, we started finding other shit that shared its orbit.

We reclassified it as an asteroid, which was not a previously known thing.

And we made...

Ceres the king of the asteroid belt.

Pretty much exactly what happened to Pluto, only now it's the Kuiper belt instead of the asteroid belt kuiper belt sounds like an old-timey abandoned jewish slur that grok just rediscovered just

just calling everyone from msnbc at all of a sudden yeah shut up kuiper belt

uh hey grok thanks again for the recipe for let's see potato and leaked soup but do i absolutely have to heat it with the space lasers

now of course that leaves the question of why it took so long for astronomers to officially reclassify pluto Pluto.

And I guess there's no consensus on this, but I think it's worth noting that the last people who were willing to admit that Ceres wasn't an actual planet were Sicilians.

And Pluto is the

only so-called planet that was discovered in America.

And of course, unlike Sicily, America, A, had an outsized influence in the larger world of astronomy during this whole period.

And B, didn't have a historical, oh, well, like Archimedes to fall back on when we lost our only planet, right?

So if you think about it, people who continue to insist that Pluto should be classified as a planet are being kind of nationalist, right?

Like, I mean, what else could it be?

If I fucks up your mnemonic, well, hey, maybe it's time you got your own fucking pizza.

Your mother, after all, is very elderly.

I don't know why we've been pushing all the pizza fetching on her this whole time, anyway.

Some of our moms love us, Noah.

Oh, Jesus.

I learned it from Screech on Save by the Bell as Mvemjsund.

So now it's just Mvemjsund.

Much easier.

Okay, so now that I've definitively settled the debate about Pluto's planethood, let's rewind the story to the year 1930.

The biggest movie in theaters was all quiet on the Western Front.

The Lindy Hop was the dance of the day.

And the most popular thing on television was oscilloscope waveforms because commercial television broadcasts wouldn't begin until 1941.

And it was at the tail end of what is certainly the most technologically whipsawing half-century in human history.

Right?

A person turning 50 in 1930 would have watched airplanes, cars, movies, air conditioners, vacuum cleaners, and broadcast radio come into existence.

Just imagine how busy the Tom of that era had to be.

Oh, you hear that, Tom?

You could have just been afraid of things that go vroom.

All right, jokes on you.

I am afraid of things that go vroom.

It's fair.

So, but the 1930s.

Things you make you go vroom.

Yes.

Cecil, I was singing that mine.

I was too.

I was too.

So yes.

So the 1930s came at a time with rapid astronomical discovery as well.

So consider this.

For all of human history, we had seven known heavenly bodies.

Eight, if you count Earth, but oddly enough, we wouldn't discover that one until later.

So seven bodies for 300,000 years or so.

And once we add Earth, we subtract the sun from this.

So that changes in 1600.

when Jupiter gets a few moons and Saturn gets a few more.

In the 1700s, we get a a whole new planet in the form of Uranus.

It's got two moons plus Saturn gets two more.

By the 1800s, it's getting downright crowded.

We get an eighth planet that isn't a planet in Ceres.

We get an eighth planet that is a planet in Neptune.

It gets a moon.

Uranus gets two more.

Jupiter gets another one.

Saturn gets two more, that ostentatious fuck.

And even Mars gets in on the action with two little moonlets of its own.

And by the time we get to 1900, Jupiter has already racked up four more moons, bringing its total to nine.

Okay, I do not know how to break this to you, Noah, but for an essay about Pluto, you are spending very little time on cartoon dogs.

He's building, he's building.

It's all right to leave a note here and there.

That's fine.

So, of course, once astronomers had that

heavenly bodies.

I didn't want to fucking hear about goofy.

All right, so once astronomers had that many heavenly bodies to work with, they could start doing way more intricate math with regards to the interactions of these various worlds.

And one of the things things they discovered when they did all of this math was that two of the planets weren't moving quite right.

Both Uranus and Neptune.

Carry the four, god damn.

But it turned out that both Uranus and Neptune, the most distant known planets, seemed to be getting tugged by another gravitational force.

So this led scientists to speculate that there was at least one more.

So this led scientists to speculate that there was at least one more planet yet to find.

And And of course, this touched off a race to see who could be the first to find it.

Yeah, modern toddler parents play this game in the form of, did someone fart or did the baby shit itself?

It's like that for astronomy.

Right, exactly.

Oh, no, dad shit himself.

That's a new one.

Put that on the board.

That's just in my house.

Cecilia, it's crazy you haven't had kids.

It makes no sense.

Now, it's worth pointing out that this idea of using Newtonian mechanics to sort out where a planet should be, that wasn't new.

That's how we found Neptune.

In 1840, a French astronomer named Urbain Le Verrier crunched the numbers on Uranus's orbit.

He figured out not only that there was another planet tugging on it, but where that planet was.

Now, telescopes of the day could barely make out the faint glow of Neptune back then.

So it would take another six years and a German guy to actually find it.

But Verrier gets a huge amount of the credit for telling him where it would be.

Figuring out stuff by the absence of stuff.

It's like the Panama Papers journalist, except this person lived.

Okay, makes sense yeah same as how we know about hillary eating all those babies like if she didn't eat them where are they where

right she ate the whole

food ate the whole uh basement yeah but but even after we found neptune and we factored that in there were still some perturbations in uranus's orbit that didn't make sense so astronomers went looking for a ninth big ass planet but what they were actually seeing were the anomalies caused by 3000 plus relatively small objects so needless to say their math was off In fact, Pluto was observed and documented more than a dozen times before anybody realized what the fuck it was.

The wiki calls these observations precoveries, which is, yeah, it's the kind of word you got to make up if you're a culture that wants to venerate Christopher Columbus, I guess.

It's not our fault.

Pluto is so pretty.

Precovery is a compliment, if you think about it.

Okay, guys, when a man makes a juvenile joke like that, it's because he hasn't grown up yet.

One could even say he's a bit premature.

Now, of course, astronomers all over the world were looking for this bonus planet, but the man leading the search was American businessman and Martian canal enthusiast Percival Lowell.

He was determined to find that elusive extra planet, and he sort of did.

He was among the pre-coverers that snapped photos of it without realizing it,

realizing that that's what they were looking at anyway.

But he would die before the mystery could be solved.

Now, after he died, his wife and his very famous observatory got into a decade-long legal battle that ground the search to a halt.

But when it was picked back up in 1929, the director handed the job to a 23-year-old astronomer that had just started at the observatory.

His name was Clyde Tombaugh, and apparently he got the job because the boss was impressed with a couple of pictures that the kid drew.

That was his primary qualification for a spot in astronomical history.

Yeah, that's weird because Clyde says he never wrote a picture in his entire life.

That's interesting.

We'll see what happens after a quick break.

Because twisting the knob forward means zoom in.

It's the way your eyes are going.

Okay, but back is more realistic to the thing the telescope is doing internally.

I don't care what it's doing internally.

Hello, fellas.

Oh, wow.

Chris, hey,

you're back.

Cool.

Dude, we're so glad to see you.

Thanks, fellas.

Recovery hasn't been a little, but I'm sure.

Yeah, yeah, you are.

And again, we are

so

sorry about Debbie.

Yeah, we were all so sad when we heard.

So was my uncle.

No, of course.

Well, hold on, guys.

While I was having a downtime, I think I found the new planet.

Oh,

the one that Le Verrier found?

Yeah, that's the one, gentlemen.

Let me introduce you to Pluto.

Oh,

oh, wow.

It uh

looks kind of small, like really small.

I know.

We must spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out its mysteries.

Well, sure, it's just dude.

What, man?

It's not a planet.

He said not planned for you to find the planet, but you did.

You found it.

Seriously?

Are we going to just...

And I know that Pluto, for the god of the underworld, who currently holds my sweet Debbie in his embrace.

Right.

Because she got scrushed between those two trucks in front of him.

Yeah.

Sorry, you know what I'm saying?

I was saying,

are we going to celebrate or what, man?

Because you found a new planet.

Take double.

Take Debbie.

Take Debbie.

We know, man.

We know.

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All right, guys, you ready to record the rest of the podcast?

All right.

Yeah.

Hey, what happened to Eli?

Oh, he's earning lunch.

Earning?

Like, like with money?

No, no.

He's been trying to eat healthier lately, but since he doesn't have time to cook or prep easy meals, he just runs downstairs and then runs back up before he eats lunch every day.

Okay.

Runs all the way.

We're on the 24th floor.

Yeah.

Yeah.

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Oh, what's

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Well, um, Eli's, he's gonna be here in a second, I think.

You want to head in?

Yeah, sure.

Hey, guys, I'm here.

Do you

think the pause was too long comedically?

Do you think people

think people checked to see if the podcast was paused by accident?

I bet they did.

Oh, I'm gonna throw up.

Okay, what about Taskmaster?

Is that porn?

No, it's comedy.

Okay, well, it sounds like porn.

Hey, guys, what's up?

I'm trying to convince Tom to use a VPN for his Netflix.

Oh, dude, are you not using a VPN for Netflix?

You have to.

Why?

I don't even know what a VPN does.

VPN, Tom.

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What's Express VPN?

Keith, you weren't even in the ass.

Yes, I was.

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All right, no one.

Thanks, man.

I wonder what I should watch first.

Batman the animated series.

Okay, is that one porn?

I mean, it depends on who you ask.

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And we're back.

And we left off.

What is Pluto?

I'm getting there.

I'm getting there.

Okay.

So, getting the discover the new planet gig, it seems like a pretty awesome job for the new guy, but that's only because we know he succeeds, right?

This is something that Percival Lull, who, despite being a bit of a crank, was also a fucking legend in observational astronomy, was unable to do after years of effort.

So, the actual job he was being handed was to look at pairs of photographs over and over again and see if there are any ever so slight differences in them, right?

Because that's how you find shit that isn't a star.

Stars move with the rotation of the Earth.

So anything that isn't moving exactly as the stars are moving is something local.

It's a planet or an asteroid or a dwarf planet, whatever.

But Pluto, in addition to being really small and really far away, is also moving really slowly.

So slowly that it won't get back to the place it was when Tombaugh first found it until March 23rd of 2178.

So this kid was looking for the faintest discernible light moving the faintest imaginable distance.

And he found it.

It's like if your job was to find the difference between the two drawings that are in the newspaper next to the junior jumble, where the difference is like one fish has an extra scale.

Corporate needs you to find the differences between this grainy dot and this grainy dot.

Right.

Exactly.

So

it took nearly a year, but on February 18th, he's sitting sitting at this device called a no shit blink comparator which you use to compare images in the blink of an eye and he notices a tiny non-sidereal movement from like fucking six photons worth of a light source it takes him almost a full month to double check all these other photos and confirm it but on march 13th he calls harvard college observatory and tells him it's time to update their textbooks So shortly thereafter, the world was abuzz with new planet fever.

This wasn't the first new planet to be discovered, of course, but it was the first American one, damn it.

And it was also the first one to be discovered in the age of mass media.

So the Lowell Observatory is immediately swamped with name ideas for the new world.

The top three suggestions were Minerva, Cronus, and Pluto.

So they went with the least cool of those three.

Apparently, Minerva was already taken.

There's an asteroid named Minerva, and Cronus was rejected because the guy championing that name was an asshole that nobody liked.

All right, guys, we can go with Cronus, who like ate his own kids.

Also, fucking Kyle wants that one.

Or we can do the underworld guy.

I'm saying underworld guy.

Yeah.

Honestly, he's enough of an asshole that it's a good thing we didn't like let him name a planet.

And for what it's worth, Pluto

is a pretty

thank you.

Thank you.

What kind of asshole would say?

Oh, you wrote my side name.

All right,

for what it's worth, Pluto was a pretty solid name.

First of all, five of Saturn's six surviving kids already had heavenly bodies named after them.

Jupiter, Neptune, Ceres, Juno, and Vesta.

So it seemed like the least we could do.

Plus, Pluto was the god of an inhospitable underworld, and Pluto had that kind of shit going for it, like a few other places in the solar system.

It's also, and this seems stupid now, but the search for the ninth planet was so heavily associated with the beloved Percival Lowell that the fact that Pluto started with his initials probably genuinely factored into the name.

But for whatever reason, the observatory submitted their suggested name to both the American Astronomical Society and the Royal Astronomical Society.

Both groups approved it unanimously.

And on May 1st of 1930, Pluto was officially christened.

I'm glad they agreed.

Otherwise, we'd have an aluminum-aluminium situation.

Yeah, dude.

Wait till you hear my essay about Neptune, dude.

So, okay.

Now, of course, we knew almost nothing about it, right?

We could work out its orbit, its distance, and its approximate mass from the observations that the Lowell Observatory made.

And all the more so once every high-powered telescope in the world was suddenly turning its way.

But that's all we could really figure out until telescope technology improved.

Okay, hey, I know we're not going to know for sure until we get like a better look at it, but it's bound to be, you know, cold, lifeless, and dry.

Are you sure we don't want to call this a Shapiro?

So, okay, so the first big info dump on Pluto would come in 1978 when we discovered the largest of Pluto's satellites, the moon Charon.

And Charon is actually pretty interesting in its own right.

It is by far the largest moon relative to the world it's orbiting.

It's more than half the size of Pluto, which is so big that their shared center of gravity is outside of Pluto.

Meaning, like no one object actually orbits the other.

The two objects orbit a shared center based on their relative masses.

That center is called a barycenter, but on Earth, our moon is small enough that the Bary Center is well within our planet.

It's like 3,000 miles or 4,600 kilometers from the Earth's center, but that's still well within the planet.

And compared to other planet-moon systems, our moon is fucking huge.

But with Pluto, the berry center is about 600 miles or 960 kilometers or so above the planet's surface, which is fucking nuts.

That berry center is just shooting berry filling everywhere.

It's crazy.

I was hearing berry center too.

You know what I've been doing with donuts?

I've been enjoying just like a plain glazed recently.

It's the classic.

It's such a delicious classic.

Unless it was made in the last 25 minutes, you're just wasting your time.

Okay.

Blueberry cake.

Oh, that's good.

Yeah.

So, anyway, so we found Charon.

You can get an apple fritter.

Why wouldn't you just get an apple fritter?

It's getting

a little bit of a cake.

Thank you, Apple.

Thank you.

This is Danish Gate.

All I have to do is

an apple fritter.

No, I'd have to remember

those we just mentioned.

Very happy.

Those are all very good.

So, okay, so we found Charon and we were like, hey, that's cool.

And that was it for Pluto until like 1992 when David Jewett and Jane Liu discovered 1992 QB1, the first Kuiper Bell object or KBO that wasn't Pluto.

They would go on to discover another one the following year.

And within another decade, they'd be finding KBOs so big that we would have to name them.

Those would be things like Eris, Maki Maki, Huomeea, and the losingest Scrabble hand ever, Quawar.

And yes, I know Eris isn't technically a KBO, but there isn't room in this show to talk about the scattered disc, you fucking fucking nerds.

You've embarrassed yourself.

So many of you have embarrassed yourself.

We'd hate to get too in the weeds.

Yeah, I don't want to get nerdy in this episode.

But following Pluto's leads, I guess they're all named after underworld gods from around the world.

These objects in the belt that they orbit around were named the Kuiper belt after Gerard Kuiper, the Dutch-American astronomer that first proposed its existence in 1951.

Oh, no, I'm sorry.

No, I just looked this up.

Pluto actually first appeared alongside Mickey in 1930.

Jesus.

I'm not sure what you're on about with the rest of this.

Mostly because I'm not paying any attention at all.

That's crazy.

Yeah, you can't hear it, but he's doing that bouncy ball on a paddle thing.

I've gotten pretty good at it.

I already played cup and stick during these.

I play cup and stick.

The thing that's worse is he's bad at it.

I don't think he's gotten higher than you.

You can get higher than that.

He's like cup and stick.

Cup and stick.

That's like stick and hoop and ball and cup, but like he took a hybrid and did like one of these good games.

It's a good game.

I don't even know what you're talking about.

I don't even know.

codon.

Maybe Kendema?

Yeah.

Now, of course, to this point, we didn't really know anything about Pluto itself, right?

We didn't even know what fucking color it was.

Everyone assumed it was white because it'd be icy as all fuck out there.

But even the best telescopes that we had.

Even the best ones that we have today that are Earthbound aren't powerful or even that are orbiting the Earth.

They're not powerful to see more than a few pixels when they're pointed at Pluto.

But that would start to change right about the time that we started finding Pluto's neighbors because in 1992, JPL scientist Robert Steele famously called Clyde Tombaugh, who was 86 years old by then, and asked for permission to visit his planet.

Clyde thought about it and said he was welcome to it, though he warned him it would be a long, cold trip.

And then he was like, Yeah, I fucking know, man.

I'm a JPL scientist.

But that conversation served as sort of the unofficial start date of NASA's New Horizons mission, which would conduct the first flyby of Pluto in July of 2015.

Now, like most NASA missions, this this one almost didn't happen several times.

And for the first 10 years, it was just a constant holding pattern as different ideas got kicked around, funded and defunded.

And by 2001, they'd settled on the basic outlines of the New Horizons mission.

And then they cut the funding for it.

But then they got it back.

And in January of 2006, after several launch delays, it lifted off from Cape Canaveral.

A few burns and drop stages later, and it was traveling 36,373 miles per hour.

That's 58,536 kilometers an hour, making it the fastest object ever launched from the Earth.

It would also hold the record for the fastest a spacecraft traveled until the Parker Solar Probe outran it in 2023.

Yeah, there's actually a really inspiring video of New Horizons just fucking flying, but then it like tears its hamstring and its dad has to come out, help it along.

It's inspiring stuff.

It is, it is.

It'll bring a tear to your eyes.

Beautiful.

Now, I'm guessing most people don't have an intuitive sense of how fast 36,000 miles per hour is.

It helps.

Yeah, it is.

It's that fast.

It's like, now,

now, now.

Yeah, right.

So, but, so, but New Horizons passed the moon's orbit about nine hours after its launch.

Okay, it took Apollo astronauts three fucking days.

And it continued to haul ass, right?

It continued to haul ass all the way to Jupiter.

It passed there in 2007.

It got a gravity assist that added even more speed and allowed it a chance to test out some of its equipment measuring Jovian moons.

And then, like, if you want to consider a real good indicator of how the fuck far away Pluto is, this spacecraft is tearing ass through the solar system at record speeds.

It gets to Jupiter a year after it's launched, and then it would take another eight years to get to Pluto, going faster.

Now, of course, pretty much immediately after New Horizons launched, the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet, and suddenly, A bunch of motherfuckers I could not pay to give a fuck about a space essay the day before had emotionally charged opinions on planetary categorization all over the fucking world.

And what that meant is that nine years later, when New Horizons finally made its flyby, there were an inordinate number of huge Pluto fans out there.

Way more than there would have been had it not gotten demoted.

Man, Pluto started way better on vinyl.

Like, it was way better.

It wasn't to be playing on vinyl.

That's what they recorded it for.

So.

So the first close-up picture of Pluto was released to the public on July 15th of 2015.

I still remember where I was.

And as I'm sure you'll all recall, those pictures were stunning.

I can't.

Like most people, right?

Yes, thank you.

Like most people were expecting an absolute snowball of a planet just covered in ice and looking like a place that would freeze your taunt on before it reached the first marker.

But what we actually saw instead was this beautiful salmon-colored world with hints of blues and yellows and oranges and distinct geological zones that you could make out from 10,000 miles up.

And of course, a giant, undeniably heart-shaped feature smeared across its face like it was telling us to like and subscribe.

Yeah, Pluto's on live on TikTok asking us for galaxies.

Yeah, right?

Great pics, Pluto.

Much hotter than expected.

Do you do custom stuff?

Tom gets cash out.

But the mission returned a lot more than just unexpectedly pretty pictures.

It also sent back terabytes of data that could also help us tackle the fundamental mystery at the heart, so to speak, of Pluto.

Where the fuck did it come from?

See, for a while, astronomers thought it was, well, no,

no, it doesn't count.

So for a while, astronomers thought it was an escaped Neptunian moon, but thank you.

There it is.

But the math doesn't work out on the Neptunian moon thing.

No matter how far back you rewind their orbits, Neptune and Pluto were never remotely close to each other.

In fact, the truth actually goes the other way.

It's now believed that Neptune's largest moon, Triton, is actually a captured Kuiper bell.

get the out of here so what is pluto

well done sir so what is pluto well

it's actually a lot like a comet according to the wiki if you were to place pluto close enough to the sun it would develop a tail like a comet Though the next sentence calls that into question given Pluto's escape velocity.

But in terms of its basic structure, it appears to be a lot like a giant comet with an orbit that's eccentric as hell for a planet, but damn near circular for a comet.

And the working theory that's most favored right now, as I understand it as a fake expert, is that Pluto is what happens when a fuck ton of comets all crash into each other.

And apparently, all those comets were just chunks that would have formed a planet of their own if Neptune hadn't elbowed its way into their would-be orbit from closer in.

So, despite the general tendency to classify Pluto and its ilk as trans-Neptunian, they were there first.

Neptune should be considered trans-Kyperian, damn it.

That's right.

This show isn't afraid to get controversial.

Nice.

All right.

And if you have to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be?

That I can too make it all the way through a space episode without having to wake Tom up.

He'll just be asleep through a lot.

Hey,

sticking out.

All right.

And are you ready for the quiz?

I'm always ready for nerdy space shit.

All right, Noah.

It's obvious from this essay that the best way to make people care about space is with a little bit of drama.

So what lie should science tell next to further its goals?

Oh, interesting.

A, the boson Hicks particle is shaped like a dick.

B, the Hubble telescope is searching for alien boobs.

Or C,

Mars is on suicide watch and really needs us to be up there for it right now.

Oh, but definitely C, definitely.

It is C correct.

It knows Elon Musk is coming.

Noah, there should be a game show where the solar system objects compete to become planets.

What should it be called?

A,

trial and arrow.

B.

To whom do I owe the honor?

C.

That's so good.

The most amazing planet for D.

D.

The World Series.

Jesus Christ.

Dude, it's got to be Secret Answer E, all of the above.

Those are the most amazing goddamn answers you've ever done on this show.

Thank you.

I love this so much.

Thank you.

I saw this in the fucking notes beforehand and I just fell in love.

I had to start messaging little hearts to say so.

I promise to laugh at your jokes next time.

I promise.

Okay.

You should make this a shirt.

Just Eli and Mars up there.

Ha!

Fucking got you, motherfucker.

I heard you.

Hey, Tom, do you have a question?

Hey, oh, oh, shit.

Okay.

All right.

I got it.

I got it.

I got it.

Tom, hurt yourself.

Hurt yourself again.

All right.

I'm away.

I'm away.

Noah.

Noah.

You missed most of the really interesting stuff about Pluto.

It's weird.

Which of the following is the best fun fact you didn't tell us about Pluto?

A,

Pluto was originally a jackboot of the prison industrial complex, having been drawn as a bloodhound whose job was to track Mickey after the mouse escaped from a chain gang.

Come on.

B, Pluto received an Academy Award in 1942 for his role in the animated short, Lend a Paw.

Or C, Pluto was originally Minnie's dog, but became Mickey's pal as Pluto gained popularity because even cartoon women can't have nice things.

Oh, interesting.

I'm going to go with

secret answers, both A and C, but not B because I have to be wrong for the whole thing to work.

That's probably all of them, but yeah, you're wrong.

I wasn't paying attention to your answer either.

Tom, nicely done.

You won Stick Cup and you stumped Noah.

You win both.

All right.

Let's have an essay from Eli.

It's Miniman.

All right.

Well, for Tom, Noah, Cecil, and Eli, I'm Heath.

Thank you for hanging out with us.

We'll be back next week, and Eli will be an expert on something else.

Between now and then, you can listen to Asterisk.

Between now and then, you can listen to Cognitive Dissonance, The No Rogan Experience, Dear Old Dad's God Awful Movies, The Scathing Atheist, The Skeptic, and DD minus.

And if you'd like to join the ranks of our beloved patrons, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash citation pod.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, listen to past episodes, connect with us on social media, or take a look at show notes, check out citationpod.com.

And that's when I realized I had discovered a brand new particle.

I don't know, Chris.

And I could name it after my dog, Bozon.

You know what?

Why not?

Let's do it.

He was driving the truck that squooshed my wife.

Yeah, I know.

We saw the news.

Squished herself out.

I know.

Are we going to celebrate or what, man?

Because you found a new planet.

Countria.

Totlabel.

To Debbie.

To Debbie.

She got squished so bad.

Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

See, he only laughs when it's his joke.

Yeah.

Amazing.

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