All that time we spent memorizing the planets for the all-important science class jeopardy game in elementary school...worthless. Turns out, it's even harder to forget random pieces of information once you don't need to know them anymore. Regardless, in 2006, poor Pluto (see above likeness) was downgraded from planet to dwarf planet - more specifically, the largest member of the Kuiper belt. Actually, no one really learned anything new about Pluto. They just sat down and defined the word "planet" for the first time, and it happened to exclude Pluto. Oops.
So a quick science rundown: Pluto was first discovered in 1930 and enjoyed a happy life as the ninth planet in the solar system for 76 years. On August 24, 2006, the International Astronomical Union defined a planet according to the following guidelines: 1) an object that is in orbit around the sun, 2) has enough mass to maintain a round-ish shape (good one rocket scientists), and 3) has a strong enough gravitational force to be the dominant object in its orbit, ie satellites are okay. Since Pluto only meets the first two of these criteria, it is confined to a sad, lonely life as a dwarf planet.
While nothing has actually changed astronomically, people seemed to take offense to Pluto's supposed mistreatment. Immediately following the reclassification, there was an outpouring of support for Pluto. Petitions, Facebook groups, websites, etc. cropped up to defend Pluto's rights as a planet, and to express appreciation for a chunk of rock and ice that had been there all along. Perhaps the best thing to come out of the Pluto scandal was the 2006 word of the year. "To pluto" was defined by the American Dialect Society as "to demote or devalue something." For example: Hey, what happened to Sarah Palin? Oh, she totally got plutoed.
Pluto is too dwarfy to see from Alaska anyway.
