JACK: This is our solar system, well it's a model of our solar system. Sun at the centre and the 8 planets that orbit it. Wait a second, what's this? Pluto? What are you doing here Pluto? What? Don't look at me like that. What do you want me to do? You're technically not a planet anymore, you're a dwarf planet. But that doesn't mean you're not important. Pluto your discovery was very important, and it led to us learning even more about our solar system. Yeah that's right. Let me explain but let's go back a bit.
It was the ancient Babylonians that first observed the planets in our solar system. They noticed that while most stars stayed in the same position relative to each other some of them would move around the sky. They weren't stars at all they were planets. In fact, the word planet comes from the Greek word wanderer because they wandered through the sky.
At first we thought there were only 5 planets Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Then in the 16th Century we realised that Earth was also a planet, yep mind blown. It was Nicolaus Copernicus in 1543 that suggested the planets revolved around the Sun. It took a few years to catch on but eventually people accepted the idea.
JACK: About two hundred or so years later we discovered Uranus. Hey, no jokes please Pluto. Cheeky.
Like the other planets you can see Uranus without a telescope. Because it's quite dim and moves very slowly no one really noticed it until 1781 when astronomer and composer, Frederick William Herschel, came along and discovered it. Then in 1846 astronomers noticed something weird happening to Uranus' orbit. Turns out it was because of the gravitational pull of planet 8, Neptune.
And that brings us to Pluto. In 1930 American astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh was checking out images he'd taken of the stars and realised one of those specks of light kept moving. Pluto's discovery made headlines. It's name was actually suggested by an 11-year-old who thought it would be cool to name it after the roman god of the underworld, seeing as Pluto lives in such a cold and desolate part of the solar system. Then we spent the next few decades remembering the names of all nine planets in our solar system until...
JACK: Yep Pluto my friend you were downgraded to a dwarf planet. I mean you are pretty small compared to the others. Especially that one and that one and that one, well, all of them really.
You're actually smaller than our moon and Australia, yeah you're pretty tiny. Plus, we've found a bunch of other objects in the solar system that bigger than Pluto, but not quite big enough to be planets. In 2016 we sent this spacecraft to study Pluto, found out it had a bunch of moons and best of all had a big old love heart on its surface. Naww.
JACK: So, to some of us you'll always have a special place in the solar system. Just not this model because you know accuracy.
