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Astronomers Discover 'Dwarf Planet' Pluto Is Actually Huge 'Mondo Planet'

Diagram showing the relative sizes of Pluto, it's four moons Charon, Hydra, Nix and Cerberus next to dinky Jupiter and (yawn) Earth.

July 31st 2011

The embarassed astronomers of the world are having to rethink the status of Pluto once again. Demoted from it's former classification as a planet to the humiliating 'dwarf planet' status by the International Astronomical Union in 2006, Pluto seemed destined to wander the far distant reaches at the fringe of the solar system along with other lonely planetoids and Kuiper belt objects with quirky names like Quaoar, Orcus and Ixion (a.k.a. the "Icky One").

But now, corrections to the calculations originally done regarding Pluto's distance from the Sun have revealed that Pluto, instead of being a diminutive ice ball, only looks teeny because it's actually way farther away from us than was previously understood. Therefore it's size is likely many times larger than the gas giant Jupiter, formerly the first place holder among the planets of the solar system. Of course, this means that Pluto dwarfs Planet Earth, and in fact, three of Pluto's four moons: Charon, Hydra and Nix, also dwarf planet Earth. Furthermore, it means that Pluto's newly discovered fourth moon, currently designated P4 (but soon to be named Cerberus after the dog that guards the gates of the underworld, even though there's already an asteroid named that) anyways, P4 is certainly quite a bit larger than Earth's moon (which is called imaginatively "Moon").

"It's sorta like when you do that thing where you put your thumb and forefinger up in front of your eyes and pretend to use them to squish the head of someone you don't like, it's sorta like that" said Doug Bifftumbriel, planetary nomenclaturist at the Very Faint And Chilly Object Observatory situated on the soaring peaks of Mt. Totomanjaro in Nebraska's Grande Topekans mountain range.

An emergency plenary (or was it planetary) session called by the International Astronomical Union has redesignated Pluto from a 'dwarf planet' to a 'mondo planet' which the staff at Quackmondo were very excited about and so they spent the entire day walking around pretending to squish the collective heads of the members of the International Astronomical Union between their fingers.

Doug Bifftumbriel spends many hours imagining himself squishing the heads of his enemies in academia.

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