MIDWEEKLY: Why is Pluto No Longer a Planet?🪐❌

Fun Kids Science Weekly

Fun Kids

Education For Kids, Kids & Family, Science

4.4 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

You’ve been sending in your questions, and this week…

Zimbobi wants to know why Pluto is no longer a planet, Alfie is curious about why we get brain freeze, Zara wonders if the ocean gets warmer as you go closer to the Earth’s core, and Charlie is fascinated by why whales sometimes explode after they die!

And Amy’s exploring all kinds of planes and how they work. She explains what composites are and how engineers make planes super light yet incredibly strong!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello Explorer, welcome along to a bonus bite of searching through the solar system. It's time for a brand new fun kid science midweekly. My name is Dan and this week it's a question special. I love discovering just some of the most amazing parts of the universe with you and seeing
0:24.9	what you're wondering. Any questions about science, send them over to me. You can do that. It's a message
0:30.3	on the Fun Kids website. My favourite, though, is when you send over a voice note on the free FunnKids
0:36.0	app and at FunKidsLive.com.
0:38.4	That way, I know what you're thinking.
0:39.8	I know who you are.
0:41.2	We'll get you on.
0:42.0	You can star on the show.
0:44.0	So fire over that voice note really easy.
0:46.3	You can click the big red record band on the website and on the app.
0:50.5	Let's get on one of those.
0:52.4	Here's a question from Zimbobby.
0:57.8	Hi, man. My name is Zimbabwe. Why is Pluto not a planet anymore?
1:04.2	Hey Zimbabwe, why is Pluto not a planet anymore? Well, Pluto was a planet. It was the ninth planet in the solar system. You had Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and then Pluto. It was about 3.7 million miles from the sun. Although its orbit is very elliptical, shaped like an oval, so it gets much further away and then much closer
1:29.5	than that. It was discovered in 1930, almost 100 years ago, and for most of that time, yeah,
1:36.6	it was a planet until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union changed their minds, they redefined what counts as a planet.
1:49.6	For a planet to be a planet, it needs three things. That's what they say now.
1:55.4	Number one, it needs to orbit the sun. Well, Pluto does that check. Number two, it needs to be spherical.
2:00.5	Pluto is it has enough gravity to, it needs to be spherical. Pluto is. It has enough
2:01.5	gravity to pull itself into a round shape. Third, and finally, this is where it got a bit sticky,
2:09.8	a planet must clear its orbit. Pluto doesn't do that. It's quite tricky to explain and define
2:16.6	what clearing an orbit is. Basically, it needs to be the boss of its area. It's quite tricky to explain and define what clearing and orbit is. Basically,
	...

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