1. Even More Things in Heaven and Earth

Even More Things in Heaven and Earth - nyt February 3, 2011

In this article the author, Michael Byers, starts with a recent announcement by the astronomers that a planetary object called Eris is smaller than Pluto. This allows us to revisit Pluto's status, which was doungraded from this of a planet to a "dwarf" since discovery of Eris in 2005. The author goes on to tell us about the discovery of Pluto in 1930, which was, as it happens, a result of a serious of measurement errors and observational mistakes.

I found this article interesting, because it shows how the human knowledge moves ahead even though there are mistakes in the process of acquiring data and interpreting the results. The author says at the end of the article that astronomers identified 1,235 possible planets in other star systems. Potentially there are inhabitants on one of them - and this what makes the science of astronomy really fascinating for me.