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Cake day: March 17th, 2024

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  • Pluto being too small isn’t actually the grounds on which it got demoted. The size requirement is just being massive enough to reach hydrostatic equilibrium - that is, be heavy enough that it’s round. Pluto does meet this one

    The one it fails is clearing its orbit. This basically means being much heavier than everything else in the same orbit. Be gravitationally in charge of your orbit. The other eight are all hundreds if not thousands of times heavier than everything else in their orbit (not including moons, since they’re gravitationally bound to the planet anyway), whereas Pluto is less than a tenth of the total mass in its own orbit. Ceres is actually more gravitationally dominant over its orbit than that, although still nowhere near the eight planets.

    This one sounds a bit weird at first, but I kinda like how it has such a massive delineation between the things we instinctively think of as planets and everything else.










  • It’s actually in England, although funnily enough the part of England it’s in is called Cumbria, which has the same origin as the Welsh for Wales “Cymru”. So it’s sort of in Wales, just not the Wales that we call Wales in English.

    Anyway it’s Old English torr, Middle Welsh penn, and Danish hoh. And like many British place names the pronunciation is not what you would expect at all at first glance. It’s “tra-pen-uh”