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Remember Pluto?

Remember Pluto?

DJ Clock, Beatenberg Pluto (Remember You) (2013)

The hit single of DJ Clock’s 2014 album The 4th Tick: Clockumentary topped the South African radio charts for a total of 37 weeks upon its release. This was due to DJ Clock’s previous success as a house and dance music DJ and producer, as well as his collaboration with the then-newcomer band Beatenberg—but perhaps some of the credit also has to go towards the title of the song because, yes, of course we remember Pluto.

More specifically, many of us surely remember when in 2006, Pluto lost its status as the ninth “full” planet of our solar system and instead was re-classified as a dwarf planet. Dwarf planets are found at the outermost parts of a solar system, where they are close enough to the central star to have an orbit but far enough away that other space debris will also float in this planet’s orbit (whereas a “regular” planet has an orbit free of any foreign objects). The term, therefore, has nothing to do with the planet’s actual size—although Pluto is also rather small: With a diameter of 1,400 miles (2,380 km), it’s just about half as wide as the United States.

For those readers still feeling bad about Pluto’s planetary demotion take comfort in the fact that Pluto, as one of five dwarf planets in our solar system, is not alone in this category—and that despite the fact that it’s positioned at the far end of our solar system, NASA sent their New Horizons mission by to snap pictures of it in 2015.

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