Pardon me as I go into one of my “left field” dives into a planetary astronomy story. 

The Los Angeles Times reported this morning that an Asteroid on track for possible Mars hit:

An asteroid similar to the one that flattened forests in Siberia in 1908 could plow into Mars next month, scientists said Thursday.

Researchers attached to NASA’s Near-Earth Object Program, who sometimes jokingly call themselves the Solar System Defense Team, have been tracking the asteroid since its discovery in late November.

The scientists, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, put the chances that it will hit the Red Planet on Jan. 30 at about 1 in 75.

A 1-in-75 shot is “wildly unusual,” said Steve Chesley, an astronomer with the Near-Earth Object office, which routinely tracks about 5,000 objects in Earth’s neighborhood.

“We’re used to dealing with odds like one-in-a-million,” Chesley said. “Something with a one-in-a-hundred chance makes us sit up straight in our chairs.”

Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeewl.  I hope NASA or JPL gets pictures if it happens. 

Susan Stryker gets equal time in Salon today to respond to John Aravosis’ “How did the T get in LGBT?” …

Pity poor John Aravosis, the gay rights crusader from AmericaBlog whose “How Did the T Get in LGBT?” essay, in reference to the controversy over gender identity protections in the pending Employment Non-Discrimination Act, was published on Salon a few days ago.

To hear Aravosis tell it, he and multitudes of like-minded gay souls have been sitting at the civil rights table for more than 30 years, waiting to be served. Now, after many years of blood, sweat, toil and tears, a feast in the form of federal protection against sexual orientation discrimination in the workplace has finally been prepared. Lips are being licked, chops smacked, saliva salivated, when — WTF!?! — a gaunt figure lurches through the door.

It is a transgender person, cupped hands extended, begging for food. Seems somebody on the guest list — maybe a lot of somebodies — let this stranger in off the streets without consulting everyone else beforehand, claiming he-she-it-or-whatever was a relative of some sort. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a fabulous dinner party starts surreally morphing into one of those OxFam fundraisers dramatizing third-world hunger whose sole function is to make the “haves” feel guilty for the plight of the “have-nots.”

Maitre d’ Barney Frank offers an elegant pretext for throwing the bum out. The establishment’s new management, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is caught off-guard by the awkward turn of events, but deftly shuffles the hubbub into the wings and starts working the room, all smiles, to reassure the assembled guests that a somber and long-sought civil rights victory will be celebrated in short order.

Aravosis and those who share his me-first perspective are not so sure. Seeing half a loaf of civil rights protection on the table before them, and sensing that the soirée might come to a premature and unexpected denouement, they make a grab, elbows akimbo, for said truncated loaf. This is, after all, their party.

In my line of work — teaching history and theory of sexuality and gender — we’ve invented a polysyllabic technical term applicable to Aravosis & Co., which is homocentric, whose definition Aravosis supplies when he asserts, as he did in his recent essay, that gay is the term around which the GLBT universe revolves. By gay he means gay men like himself, to which is added (in descending order of importance), lesbian, bisexual and transgender, beyond which lies an even more obscure region of poorly understood and infrequently observed identities.

Aravosis isn’t questioning the place of the T in the GLBT batting order; he’s just concerned with properly marking the distinction between “enough like me” and “too different from me” to merit inclusion in the categories with which he identifies. His position is a bit like those kerfuffled astronomers not too long ago, scratching their noggins over how to define Pluto’s place in the conceptual scheme of the solar system. Sure, we’ve been calling it a planet for a good number of years because it’s round and orbits the sun just like our Earth, but now it appears that if we keep doing so we’ll have to let a bunch of the bigger asteroids into the planet category, as well as some other weird faraway stuff we only recently learned about, which stretches the definition of “planet” into a name for things we don’t really think of as being much like good ol’ Earth, so let’s just demote Pluto instead. In Aravosis’ homocentric cosmology, men may not be from Mars, nor women from Venus, but transgender people are definitely from Pluto.

Transgender people have become this political season’s version of the unisex-toilet issue that helped scuttle passage of the Equal Rights Amendment back in the 1970s, of Willie Horton’s role in bringing the first Bush presidency to the White House in the 1980s, and of the “Don’t bend over to pick up the soap in the barracks shower room” argument against gays in the military in the 1990s — a false issue that panders to the basest and most ignorant of fears. This is unfortunate because protecting the rights of transgender people specifically is just one welcome byproduct of the version of ENDA that forbids discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender expression or identity. This full version of ENDA, rather than the nearly introduced one that stripped away previously agreed-upon protections against gender-based discrimination and would protect only sexual orientation, is the one that is of potential benefit to all Americans, and not just to a narrow demographic slice of straight-looking, straight-acting gays and lesbians. It doesn’t really even do that much good for this group, as Lambda Legal points out, because of a loophole big enough to drive a truck through.

Aravosis, not being one to mince words when it comes to mincing meat, wants to know what he, as a gay man, has “in common with a man who wants to cut off his penis, surgically construct a vagina, and become a woman.” The answer is “gender.” The last time I checked my dictionary, homosexuality had something to with people of one gender tending to fall in love with people of the same gender. The meaning of homosexuality thus depends on the definition of gender. However much Aravosis might wish to cut the trannies away from the rest of his herd, thereby preserving a place free of gender trouble for just plain gay guys such as himself, that operation isn’t conceptually possible. Gender and sexuality are like two lines intersecting on a graph, and trying to make them parallel undoes the very notion of homo-, hetero- or bisexuality.

Now here’s the rub — but it requires another of those fancy words my academic colleagues and I like to throw around: heteronormativity, the idea that whatever straight people do is really what’s what, and that whatever anybody else does is deviant to some degree. To want to have sex with somebody of the same gender violates heteronormative expectations of gender behavior as much as it does heteronormative expectations of sexual behavior. Simply put: Real men don’t suck cock. Nor do they use the word “fabulous” when describing a pair of women’s shoes. Nor do they keep a picture of their husband pinned to the wall of their office cubicle. All of the above violates conventional or stereotypical expectations of proper masculine gender, and as Lambda Legal’s preliminary analysis of ENDA makes clear, none would be protected under the rubric of sexual orientation alone. It’s OK to be gay, in other words, just so long as you don’t act like a fag.

Without solid theoretical ground to stand on, Aravosis resorts to flights of rhetorical fancy in lieu of an argument against gender protections. He characterizes the more than 300 GLBT organizations nationwide now on record as supporting a gender-inclusive ENDA, which collectively speak on behalf of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, as plotting something of a palace coup. They attempt, he claims, to force the gay movement — along with the country that is poised to embrace them — to crawl unwillingly into bed with a big bunch of tranny whatevers. Aravosis positions himself as a man giving voice to an oppressed silent majority, a majority too cowed by their fear of appearing “politically incorrect” to express their true feelings, in order to proclaim “that over the past decade the trans revolution was imposed on the gay community from outside, or at least above.”

This coming from an ex-Republican, former congressional aide, Georgetown-educated, inside-the-Beltway lawyer who studied under Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and who has spent the past decade working his political connections in order to hold corporate America’s feet to the fire on gay rights? Puh. Leeze. John Aravosis is in the nosebleed section of the social hierarchy; if he gets any higher up the food chain he should be issued an oxygen mask. Where, pray tell, is this “above” whereof he speaks, peopled with radical transgender revolutionaries? Somewhere in the vicinity of the Jewish international bankers, or the Trilateral Commission?

Aravosis wants to know how the T came to be added to GLB. Here’s how: It started happening in the mid-1990s, in response to the queer movement of the early 1990s, and in response to a decade of radical AIDS activism. Fighting to end the epidemic required, from a public health point of view, getting past the squabbles of homosexual identity politics left over from the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. The Reaganite right wanted to label AIDS “gay-related immune deficiency,” even though viruses are no respecters of identity. AIDS was not a gay disease, but convincing others of that fact required a transformation of sexual politics. It fostered political alliances between lots of different kinds of people who all shared the common goal of ending the epidemic — and sometimes precious little else.

What does Aravosis, as a gay man, have in common with a little girl whose mother gave her HIV in utero, or a heterosexual African man who contracted HIV from a female prostitute, or a junkie living on the streets of Bangkok, Thailand? Presumably, a common interest in ending AIDS. And what might he have in common with transgender people? Some sense that a person’s suitability for employment had something to do with their ability to do the job?

Transgender people have their own history of civil rights activism in the United States, one that is in fact older, though smaller and less consequential, than the gay civil rights movement. In 1895, a group of self-described “androgynes” in New York organized a “little club” called the Cercle Hermaphroditos, based on their self-perceived need “to unite for defense against the world’s bitter persecution.” Half a century later, at the same time some gay and lesbian people were forming the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, transgender people were forming the Society for Equality in Dress. When gay and lesbian people were fighting for social justice in the militant heyday of the 1960s, transgender people were conducting sit-in protests at Dewey’s lunch counter in Philadelphia, fighting in the streets with cops from hell outside Compton’s Cafeteria in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, and mixing it up at Stonewall along with lots of other folks.

There was a vibrant history of transgender activism and movement building through the 1970s, when it suddenly became fashionable on the left to think of transgender people as antigay and antifeminist. Gay people were seen as freeing themselves from the straitjacket of psychopathology, while transgender people were clamoring to get into the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association; feminists were seen as freeing themselves from the oppressiveness of patriarchal gender, while transgender people were perpetuating worn-out stereotypes of men and women. It’s a familiar refrain, even now. Transgender arguments for access to appropriate healthcare, or observations that no one is ever free from being gendered, fell on deaf ears.

Until the early 1990s, that is, when a new generation of queer kids, the post-baby boomers whose political sensibilities had been forged in the context of the AIDS crisis, started coming into adulthood. They were receptive to transgender issues in a new way — and that more-inclusive understanding has been steadily building for nearly two decades.

Aravosis and those who agree with him think that the “trans revolution” has come from outside, or from above, the rank-and-file gay movement. No — it comes from below, and from within. The outrage that many people in the queer, trans, LGBT or whatever-you-want-to-call-it community feel over how a gender-inclusive ENDA has been torpedoed from within is directed at so-called leaders who are out of touch with social reality. It has to do with a generation of effort directed toward building an inclusive movement being pissed away by the clueless and the phobic. That’s why every single GLBT organization of any size at the national and state levels — with the sole exception of the spineless Human Rights Campaign — has unequivocally come out in support of gender protections within ENDA, and has opposed the effort to pass legislation protecting only sexual orientation.

What happens in Congress in the weeks ahead on this historic issue is anybody’s guess. I urge all of you who support the vision of an inclusive ENDA to contact your representatives in government and let your views be known.

Why the T in LGBT is here to stay

was playing this round of cosmic billiards and …

A collision 160 million years ago of two asteroids orbiting between Mars and Jupiter sent many big rock chunks hurtling toward Earth, including the one that zapped the dinosaurs, scientists said on Wednesday.

Their research offered an explanation for the cause of one of the most momentous events in the history of life on Earth — a six-mile-wide (10-km-wide) meteorite striking Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula 65 million years ago.

That catastrophe eliminated the dinosaurs, which had flourished for about 165 million years, and many other life forms, and paved the way for mammals to dominate the Earth and the eventual rise of humankind, many scientists believe.

The impact is thought to have triggered a worldwide environmental cataclysm, expelling vast quantities of rock and dust into the sky, unleashing giant tsunamis, sparking global wildfires and leaving Earth shrouded in darkness for years.

U.S. and Czech researchers used computer simulations to calculate that there was a 90 percent probability that the collision of two asteroids — one about 105 miles wide and one about 40 miles wide — was the event that precipitated the Earthly disaster.

The collision occurred in the asteroid belt, a collection of big and small rocks orbiting the sun about 100 million miles from Earth, the researchers report in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

The asteroid Baptistina and rubble associated with it are thought to be leftovers, the scientists said.

Some of the debris from the collision escaped the asteroid belt, tumbled toward the inner solar system and whacked Earth and our moon, along with probably Mars and Venus, said William Bottke of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, one of the researchers.

DEADLY COLLISION

The collision is believed to have doubled for a while the number of impacts occurring in this part of the solar system.

In fact, while the bombardment of this region of the solar system due to this shower of debris peaked about 100 million years ago, the scientists said the tail end of the shower continues to this day. Bottke said many existing near-Earth asteroids can be traced back to this collision.

“Imagine breaking up a big, big boulder on top of a hill and all the fragments rolling down the hill. And somewhere at the bottom is a village called Earth,” Bottke said in a telephone interview.

The dinosaur-destroying meteorite, thought to have measured 6 miles across, plunged into Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and blasted out the Chicxulub (pronounced CHIK-shu-loob) crater measuring about 110 miles wide. The researchers looked at evidence on the composition of this meteorite and found it consistent with the stony Baptistina.

The researchers estimated that there also was about a 70 percent probability that the prominent Tycho crater on the Moon, formed 108 million years ago and measuring about 55 miles across, also was carved out by a remnant of the earlier asteroid collision.

Philippe Claeys of Vrije Universiteit Brussel in Belgium, who was not involved in the research, said by e-mail the findings were “clear evidence that the solar system is a violent environment and that collisions taking place in the asteroid belt can have major repercussions for the evolution of life on Earth.”

Bottke emphasized that point. “Dinosaurs were around for a very long time. So the likelihood is they would still be around if that event had never taken place,” Bottke said.

“Was humanity inevitable? Or is humanity just something that happened to arise because of this sequence of events that took place at just the right time. It’s hard to say.”

Distant space collision meant doom for dinosaurs

(click image to go to NASA page on the eclipse for local times)

Apparenly, NASA believes one third of Mars used to be covered by two oceans.  There was a probem with the theory previously, because the scientists couldn’t explain the why NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor found big, mountain-sized variations in elevation along the suspected shorelines, whereas a shoreline should be a constant elevation matching sea level.

…But scientists writing in the journal Nature said the movement of the Martian poles and also the planet’s spin axis by roughly 3,200 kilometres in the past two billion to three billion years would have triggered deformation of surface features just like that seen in the suspected coastlines.

“The pole moves and it warps the shorelines,” planetary scientist Taylor Perron of Harvard University, the study’s lead author, said in a telephone interview.

“We have don’t have direct confirmation that there were oceans because, of course, the water isn’t there any more. But what we’ve done is to eliminate one of the main reasons to doubt that they were ever there.”

Earth’s poles also have moved in the past.

At some point, a big shift of mass on Mars caused its north pole to shift 50 degrees toward its present location and the planet’s change in orientation changed the topography of the shorelines, said physicist Jerry Mitrovica of the University of Toronto, one of the researchers.

The ocean may have covered a third of the Martian surface during the first half of the planet’s history before disappearing at least two billion years ago for unknown reasons, the researchers said.

Fascinating!

Nexy’s Cocoon: Worth More Dead
Excerpt: a while after i came out as trans to my ex, we were involved in a discussion about finances. since by that time we were divorced and living in separate residences, money was extremely tight. our main concern was our son, and we spoke of the expense of sending him to college, which would begin in maybe 6 or 7 years. the issue of my transition was broached, and the eternal question of “why” was once again raised…“because it’s better than being dead”, i answered…“perhaps for you, but your son would benefit as you are worth more dead” she answered.

Screaming Into The Void: We Told You So
From a gamer discussion of playing the opposite gender, a man discusses what happened when he rolled a female character

AEBrain: Global Warming – on Neptune
Excerpt: There are two ways of interpreting this:
1. That Global Warming is all the fault of the Sun, and that Man’s impact is immeasureably small in comparison – so we should do nothing.
2. That the place is warming up anyway from natural causes, so adding Greenhouse gasses and making the situation no better, probably worse, possibly much worse, is a Bad Idea ™.

Ex-Gay Watch: Comment on Positive Portrayals of Transgender People Seen As Promoting Sin – by Peterson Toscano
Excerpt: “But why are we so surprised, as if gay people and gueer people were a modern invention, like say plastic products or CoolWhip (which technically is a plastic product) No. Think of it this way, for the first 30,000 years of human existence, God was worshipped as female, the goddess. We know this from archeology. And then humans began to worship God more and more as a male diety. So in essence, we have in God, the first transgendered being.”

Ex-Gay Watch: Screened Out: Gay Images In Film
Excerpt: If you enjoyed the Celluloid Closet, you might want to set your Tivo for this. On Monday and Wednesday evenings, for the month of June (starting tonight), Turner Classic Movies is featuring films from 1912 to 1969 which contain gay themes – 44 in all. I find these peeks into gay history fascinating, especially the obvious changes brought about by the Production Code in 1934. Before that, one could detect what appeared to be a distinct glimmer of acknowledgment, almost acceptance even, of the characters in what were mostly plot tangents. Something happened after that and what managed to pass the censors was often dark, distorted and evil.

Deb Price / Detroit News: Colorado morphs from hate to great state
Excerpt: When measured on the civil rights yardstick set by progressive states like Massachusetts, Connecticut or California, the recent breakthroughs in Colorado might seem modest. After all, when Democrat Bill Ritter signed into law a ban on job discrimination against those of us who’re gay or transgender and signed a bill giving gay partners the right to be legal co-parents, his governor’s pen was hardly going where no governor’s pen had gone before.

Shakesville: Shame and Blame
Excerpt: “Those short skirts and low-cut tops that accompany the warming late spring weather can be fantastic if you’re a hormonal teenage boy. For thousands of male high school teachers in the Bay Area, however, higher temperatures and rising hemlines are anything but a welcome development.”

Gay Military Times: Interview with Brigadier General Virgil ‘Hawk’ Richard, United States Army, retired
Excerpt: …had the Army known at any time that he was a homosexual, he would have been summarily dismissed in the same manner as any gay Private in boot camp, albeit with perhaps greater angst amongst his peers and seniors.

From Yahoo! News:

HONOLULU-Astronomers have discovered 28 new planets outside of our solar system, increasing to 236 the number of known exoplanets, revealing that planets can exist around a broad spectrum of stellar types-from tiny, dim stars to giants.

“We added 12 percent to the total in the last year, and we’re very proud of that,” said one of the study team members Jason Wright of the University of California at Berkeley. “This provides new planetary systems so that we can study their properties as an ensemble.” …

… One of the exoplanets, a red M dwarf just 30 light-years from Earth, was discovered two years ago, but recent observations have allowed astronomers to pin down its mass, radius and density. The ice-giant planet circles the star Gliese 436 (GJ 436) and has a radius and density that are surprisingly similar to that of Neptune.

Weighing in at 22.4 Earth-masses, the exoplanet is the first Neptune-sized planet observed to transit a star. The previous record holder, dubbed HD 140926b, weighed in at 100 Earth masses, and Jupiter is 320 Earth masses.

“[Gliese 436b] must be 50 percent rock and about 50 percent water, with perhaps small amounts of hydrogen and helium,” said head of the planet-search team Geoffrey Marcy, also of UC Berkeley. “So this planet has the interior structure of a hybrid super-Earth/Neptune, with a rocky core surrounded by a significant amount of water compressed into solid form at high pressures and temperatures.”

Its 2.6-day orbit around GJ 436 means the hybrid planet circles very close to its star, just 3 percent of the Sun-Earth distance, and making it a hot Neptune. Unlike most giant planets found with such close ties to their stars, this planet has an eccentric orbit. The elongated orbit suggests the parent star could have another planetary companion with a more distant orbit.

“I’m sure people will immediately follow up and try to measure the atmospheric composition of this planet,” Wright said.

GJ 436 is an M star and 70 percent of all stars are considered M-type stars, so finding that these dim stars can support planets could mean a boon for planet hunters.

BlogHer: Pres. Bush signs order granting himself emergency powers
Excerpt: Earlier this month, Pres. Bush signed an National Security Directive centralizing power in the executive branch in the event of a national emergency. Although the directive has attracted relatively little press attention, it’s an extraordinary development when WorldNetDaily and The Progressive Magazine agree that the new directive seems to give the president unprecedented powers without Congressional oversight.

Pam’s House Blend: Alabama Dept. of Homeland Security: gay rights advocates = potential terrorists
Excerpt: The Alabama Department of Homeland Security had to take down a Web page that cast a broad net in naming potential vectors of terrorism. For some reason, it published a list that included gay rights and anti-war organizations, calling the following groups “single-issue extremists.”

Box Turtle Bulletin: Another Gay Brain Study
Excerpt: It has long been known that men and women, collectively, do not perform mental tasks identically. And previous research has suggested that gay men and women perform mental tasks in a manner closer to that of the opposite sex. … An article in the April 2007 Archives of Sexual Behavior discusses a study by University of Warwick researchers of 109,612 men and 88,509 women which confirmed these observations.

the blog at the end of reason: The Land of the Lost
Excerpt: The Creation Museum, conveniently located near the airport and the interstate system, opens its doors today. There, a visitor will see a literal six day creation of the earth, learn that this planet is only 6,000 years old and see dinosaurs co-exist with humans. (ADD: Related article, but from a religious right perspective: OneNewsNow: Museum opens to defend biblical creation account)

Pantagraph.com: Community responds to party for Pluto
That distant, icy ball called Pluto may be a “dwarf planet” now, but it’s still a big deal in Streator, birthplace of its discoverer.

joe.my.god.: Transmen Controversies
Excerpt: Transmen, female-to-male transexuals, continue to be barred from membership in Chicago’s Hellfire BD/SM club, the largest of some 400 such clubs in the nation. Despite some internal dissent, including the resignation of the club’s newletter editor, the membership recently voted to maintain their 10-year policy that “there must be a penal [sic] attachment.” Hellfire is one of the few BD/SM clubs in country to have an active policy against FTMs.
(H/t: Nexy)

The Aussie Abadees: The view from my window and other Autumn updates…

Woman in Progress: Sports talk
Excerpt: My AWSM membership packet arrived in the mail the other day. That’s AWSM as in the Association for Women in Sports Media, a congregation of some of the most talented journalists and smartest sportswriters I know. I am very happy to have been welcomed into the group……Scanning the material in the packet reminded me of an exchange I had during a recent in-studio interview I did with John Ireland and Steve Mason of ESPN Radio. Near the end of a lively discussion, we were all in a pretty good mood, and Mason jokingly asked me, “So now that you’re a woman, do you know less about sports?……I laughed at that line then, and still do. It was a send-up of an age-old stereotype that AWSM did much to dispel, and female sports fans since have picked up the gauntlet in a big way…

SFGate: The Honeymoon’s Over
Police find a newlywed lying in a street with his ear partially bitten off — allegedly by his mother-in-law.

From the Los Angeles Times:

Scientists find earth-like planet; European astronomers say it orbits in a ‘sweet spot’ zone where life could exist.

European astronomers announced Tuesday that they had discovered the first planet beyond our solar system that orbits in a “sweet spot” zone where life could exist.

The planet, about five times as massive as Earth, orbits Gliese 581, a red dwarf star about 20 light-years from our solar system.

The team of Swiss, French and Portuguese scientists who found the planet estimate its surface temperature at freezing to 104 degrees Fahrenheit, a range in which water can exist as a liquid.

“Because of its temperature and relative proximity, this planet will most probably be a very important target of the future space missions dedicated to the search for extraterrestrial life,” said Xavier Delfosse, an astronomer from Grenoble University in France.

“On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X.”

The discovery was made with the European Southern Observatory’s 12-foot diameter telescope in La Silla, Chile. The planet was first detected by the telescope’s HARPS Spectrograph, which analyzes light from distant astronomical objects.

Geoffrey Marcy, a UC Berkeley astronomer who has discovered most of the so-called exoplanets orbiting other stars, called it “a marvelous discovery … the best case for a habitable planet” so far.

The next step, obviously, is finding a smaller, rocky planet in the same ‘sweet spot.’ So exciting, these panetary discoveries!

The AP has an article out entitled Early NASA Probes May Have Killed Martian Microbes. Excerpt:

Two NASA space probes that visited Mars 30 years ago may have stumbled upon alien microbes on the Red Planet and inadvertently killed them, a scientist theorizes in a paper released Sunday.

The problem was the Viking space probes of 1976-77 were looking for the wrong kind of life and didn’t recognize it, the researcher said in a paper presented at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

This new report, based on a more expansive view of where life can take root, may have NASA looking for a different type of Martian life form when its next Mars spacecraft is launched later this year, one of the space agency’s top scientists told The Associated Press.

Uh-oh. If there were life on Mars at one point, one wonders if God went there on a 7-day plan too.

Nope. Not talking about the planet Mr. Spock was from.

We’re talking about the planet people used to think was spinning near the planet Mercury. Yahoo has an article on it:

Now consider the tragic story of Vulcan. It began its life in 1859 as a calculus equation when French mathematician Urbain Le Verrier tried to account for Mercury’s deviation from its predicted orbit. Was it caused by a new planet? After all, Neptune was discovered this way. Over the years, scientists and amateur astronomers joined in the search for the hypothetical planet, but Mercury’s proximity to the sun made it difficult to view. Was it just a sunspot or an asteroid? It was a moot point by 1915 when Einstein announced his General Theory of Relativity. It neatly explained the wibble in Mercury’s wobble and later viewings during an eclipse confirmed it. There was no planet Vulcan. Ah, fleeting fame!

And who could forget old planet dwarf planet Pluto (with moon Charon) and new dwarf planet Eris (and moon Dysnomia)? Our solar system just facinates me to no end.