I opened my mail this morning to find a message from NASA entitled: “Honey, I Shrunk The Solar System.”

Turning to a co-worker, I said, “We lost a planet!”

“What?”

“Oh, yeah, I read about that,” someone else chimed in. “Pluto is gone!”

My co-worker looked panicked. “We lost a planet?!” Of course he was imagining it had exploded, or drifted out of the solar system.

No, I told him. It’s been declassified as a planet. It’s too small.

After all these years, the International Astronomical Union has finally come up with a definition of what makes a planet a planet. And Pluto is not a planet. Instead, Pluto (along with a myriad of other object in the solar system) have been given the brand new designation “Dwarf Planet.”

“That doesn’t sound right,” said my co-worker. “Dwarf planet.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Isn’t the word ‘dwarf’ politically incorrect?”

I suppose so. I guess we should really be calling Pluto a “mass-challenged planet.”