There go the little basteroids now.

This business of expanding the solar system in a way that was making even physicists wince created intergalactic turmoil, but stuffing the idea in the trash under the remnants of last night’s Chinese takeaway was the way to go.

It would all have been forgotten in another generation or two, just like the furor over the expansion of the National Hockey League three decades ago (or NATO, more recently, if you want to be less serious).

Both the NHL and NATO are poorer and sloppier now for having ballooned up, just like the complainers said they would be. A community swells and you don’t recognise people anymore. Intimacy is lost once memories of the the original camaraderie take on a “good old days” glow – and that fades with depressing speed.

I stopped watching hockey a long time ago, even before I left Canada, because there were just too many teams to keep sorted out on life’s scorecard. And planets? Well, I have a soft spot for little Pluto because I can still remember being awed as a youngster reading about Kansas farmboy Clyde Tombaugh discovering the distant rock in 1930, and how he did it, comparing photographic slides with tiny dots on them.

Clyde was an amateur, hired by the Lowell Observatory in Arizona to expose photographic plates by night and run them by day through a blink comparator. The aim was to find a planet that had been theorised by Percival Lowell – something was stretching Uranus and Neptune’s orbits out of whack.

On February 18, 1930, Tombaugh was comparing the plates exposed on January 23 and 29 and found a tiny spot of light moving across the stars of Gemini. You can still see the “discovery plate” at the National Air and Space Museum, and the telescope at Lowell.

He and his colleagues called it Planet X, and then a few months later 11-year-old Venetia Burney of Oxford, England, suggested Pluto, which the Lowell Observatory liked because it began with the initials of its founder’s name. (Ironically, it turned out that Pluto was way too small to have any effect on the bigger planets’ orbits. That was just an anomaly.)

So I was on the side of the legions of sentimental scientists who didn’t want to see Pluto kicked out of the planets club just because it’s so small and follows its own orbital drummer.

Unfortunately, Justice was standing at the door with a passel of equally needy orphans. The old solar system was going to be a full house, with lots of new satellites’ diapers to be changed.

Our options were limited and smelly.

Instead, we’re going to try and distinguish between the “classic” eight planets and Pluto and its “dwarf” siblings, the number of which is likely to rapidly leap as telescopes pick up more strays. One onlooker already had a mnemonic ready to help us memorise the new grouping: “My Very Excellent Mother Could Just Serve Us Nuts, Pizza, Carrots ‘n’ Xylophones!”, which safely (if inanely) tucked into bed Ceres, Charon and Xena.

But, planet-wise, we’re saying to Pluto, “Hit the road, ya little basteroid.”

But let’s deal with the homeless kids reasonably, with dignity and class. Let’s hold a beauty contest and see which ones might have the right stuff for future planethood. We’re already off to a good start because none of the contestants is very bright.

The judges in the International Astronomical Union were on the verge of throwing open the pageant to anybody who’s round, circles a star and is not itself a star. It could have been perfect.

Let’s have a word with Mike Brown, who, despite being the Donald Trump of this pageant because he discovered so many of the contestants, was looking pretty glum about the whole solar-system-expansion thingie. The California Institute of Technology astronomer was warning that we were being too generous, said we were heading for some sort of a “No Ice Ball Left Behind” policy.

He was certainly not happy about the proposal to include little Pluto’s littler moon, Charon, among the planets, the rationale for which is that their centre of gravity is between them, so Charon isn’t actually orbiting Pluto, just their shared centre of gravity. Earth’s moon is stuck to Earth like glue, because its centre of gravity is in Earth’s heart. Romantic stuff!

Pish, said Brown. “That one doesn’t pass the smell test.”

The New York Times noted that Sky & Telescope magazine once sponsored a contest of its own to find a more dignified name for the Big Bang and, having reviewed all the suggestions, decided all of them were worse. Worse than “the Big Bang”.

And then there was the University of Alabama professor who pointed out that the word “world” meant “universe” until Galileo started giddily pointing out other planets like Earth. “World” founds its plural.

Anyway, don’t our planetoids look lovely tonight, folks?

We’ll be back right after this commercial break with the swimsuit competition!

Intermission entertainment:

* The LA Times editorialised on August 21 that it’s “Time to Jettison Pluto”, bemoaning the possibility that we were moving from an easily comprehensible “four rocks, four gas balls and a speck of ice” to the planet redefined as “a big mass, roundish in shape, that circles a star – in other words, any number of Hollywood agents would qualify”.

The Times then got a little astray with its facts en route to a conclusion:
“The loss of Pluto would be sad, especially considering the romantic tale of its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh, an Illinois farm boy who, with no formal astronomy training, built his own telescopes and found himself a planet. But we managed without Pluto before its 1930 discovery.
“Then again, we could always force our students to memorise 53 names like UB313 – and then lament how badly they do at science.”

* While Western astrologers were waiting for signs to tell them what the addition of three new planets would have done to their charts, the Times of India managed to find three Vedic astrologers who insisted that their work wouldn’t have been affected – and one who thought it bloody well would too.

One said solar signs (”the ones most young people are into”) have nothing to do with Hindu jyotish, or “light of god”, soothsaying, which is all about the position of the moon at the moment of birth. Another said Vedic astrology has never considered planets beyond Saturn, and that Ceres, between Mars and Jupiter, is unlikely to be figured in now.

But another pointed out that “we’re all ruled by a combination of planets, which is why we’re all so exciting and almost impossible to predict”, and any new guys must be accommodated.

So long, Pluto! Keep in touch! Hubble takes a dim view of the ex-planet, seen hugging Charon while mystified satellites S/2005 P1 and S/2005 P2 watch and wonder.