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Magic Carpets, Palace Elephants and Planets
A fourth grader named Maryn Smith won an out-of-this-world contest! Maryn came up with a way to remember the names of all the planets and dwarf planets in our solar system.
A mnemonic device is a word or phrase that helps you remember something. A great example is using the name Roy G. Biv to keep track of all the colors of the rainbow in order. Roy G Biv is made from the first letter of each color in the rainbow -- red, orange, yellow, green, blue indigo and violet. You get it?
There were old mnemonics for the planets, but they no longer worked as astronomers have changed the definition of a planet. So the National Geographic Society held a contest for a new mnemonic device. Maryn's winning entry was My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants. If you take the first letter of each word, you'll have the first letter of 11 bodies in the order that they circle the sun: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto and Eris.
Three of those, Ceres, Pluto, and Eris are considered dwarf planets, which means they are much smaller than the planets. Now you have an easy way to remember the planets in our solar system. When you get an A on that quiz, you can thank Maryn!
I'm Adelbert and that's what happened in Science this week!
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