My very excellent mother just served us nine ... if not pancakes, what?

My very excellent mother just served us nine pancakes. How many of you (like me!) learned this little sentence so as to memorize the nine (now eight) planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and ... Pluto? But Pluto just went the way of the dinosaurs ... extinct, at least as a bona fide planet.

Al Gore, we need you! You have been so busy saving the earth from Global Warming, you took your eye off of another ball in the sky (the one shown in the image above is Pluto made from multiple Hubble photos taken over its rotation). It needs saving from the International Astronomy Unit (IAU) who have laid out new "rules" for what does and what does not qualify as a planet.

I am, among other things, a professor in physics who makes his first lesson (when introducing Astronomy as a unit) the memorization of the sentence, "My very excellent mother ...", so that we can more easily study the Solar System -- which is where astronomy usually begins.

The IAU now defines a planet as "a celestial body that (1) is in orbit around the sun, (2) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (3) has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit."

Whether another celestial body in the "Kuiper Belt" is a moon of Pluto or whether the two objects are a "double planet" (of sorts) is being sorted out, but for now, we'll have to get used to memorizing, "My very excellent mother just served us ... nosephlegm?

Yuk!

Noodles might be better, but students would remember nosephlegm. Neocons would be easy to remember, but has political connotations and naphtha reminds me too much of my own childhood ... after I'd use a forbidden word in the house. I'll check with my brother, Richard in Connecticut on this one. Grays Harbor College ... and high schools and middle schools nationwide are waiting for you, Richard.

[For the record, the IAU is considering renaming mini-planets -- and there are plenty of them (15 additionnal non-planets are larger than Pluto) -- as Plutons. That might make the residents of Pluto -- assumed to number zero -- happier about the recent changes. And oh yes, we might end up with as many as twelve solar planets within the next decade besides.]