This month, the sky lit up by two full Moons

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HONG KONG: “Save Pluto!” cried the T-shirts. The slogan “stop planetary discrimination” screamed out on bumper stickers all over the States. “Honk if Pluto is still a planet!”, they urged. Pluto has long been every child’s favourite planet. Discovered in 1930 by the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, this tiny world has gripped the imagination of all and sundry.
But then it became evident that Pluto was not alone. It is a member of a swarm of Kuiper Belt Objects: minuscule worlds at the edge of our Solar System. And in 2005, a team led by Mike Brown – observing from Palomar Mountain – discovered a distant object even more massive (and possibly slightly larger) than Pluto.
The new body was named Eris – a Greek goddess of discord and strife. Her name is appropriate, because her discovery challenged the status of Pluto. In August 2006, at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague, Pluto’s ranking on the Solar System was downgraded to that of “dwarf planet” – much to the disappointment of Pluto aficionados. Now there are officially only eight planets in the Solar System.
But fans of the mini-world have an event to look forward to. On 14 July, the space probe New Horizons will arrive at the Pluto system after a nine-year journey through space. It will pass within 10,000km of the now-renamed dwarf planet and 27,000km from Pluto’s major moon, Charon. New Horizons will study in intimate detail the geology and chemistry of Pluto and its moons – the tiny world has at least five in total.
Alan Stern is the principal investigator on the New Horizons mission. And he is passionate about Pluto. He told us that the minuscule world is far more than a mere afterthought of the Solar System. “Pluto, Eris and their companions are part of a huge unexplored region of our planetary neighbourhood,” he explains.