It’s such a shame to see children taught that there are nine (/eight) big things in the solar system worth caring about and that’s it. It’s so much more exciti

It’s such a shame to see children taught that there are nine (/eight) big things in the solar system worth caring about and that’s it. It’s so much more exciting to know that the solar system is an enormous continuous spectrum of debris. The debris is named and catalogued, it’s that tangible. I love seeing children go wide eyed at the mention of Ceres. It’s like the Azores of the planets — there’s another place/planet in the middle of nowhere that no one talks about?! The final step in this is to recognize that, out of the full spectrum of Trojans to TNOs to moons to planets, the planets really are in a class of their own in terms of long term effect on other bodies in their orbit. Pluto isn’t a planet. But that doesn’t mean we exclude it. It means we include Ceres and a whole lot more whenever we talk about our local system. (Or at least the inner parts of our local system that we’ve found, so far.)