What happened to Vulcan? Astrologers have been waiting for astronomers to prove its existence.

Which is redundant.

As with all politicized science, they started out with their desried conclusion: preserving the mistake made in the 1930s by defining Pluto as a planet, and worked backwards to the present fiasco. One of the hardest things for scientists to do is admit they've been proven wrong, and this is no better example.

As for so-called "Vulcan", for every solar eclipse, there are very strange people who spend those precious few minutes looking through a telescope for comets, instead of enjoying the spectacle. If it exists, they'd have seen it by now. (And the automated solar observatories would have recorded numerous transits if it as big as the astrologers claim.)

Then where did Spock come from, Raoul?

Pluto was discovered in the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. I've been there a couple of times. Suggesting that it was a mistake to call Pluto a planet might just get you kicked out.

That Vulcan was in another solar system far far away.

Try going to the Galapagos and pointing out that all the finches crossbreed.....

oj,

The Galapagos are in the Eastern Time Zone?

Suggesting that it was a mistake to call Pluto a planet might just get you kicked out.

Which is exactly the problem. Its discoverer was around for another 6 decades, and sentimentality (don't hurt Tombaugh's feelings) set into the entire science. That it took almost as long to find the next members of that class of objects just made things even worse, as there were no examples to show why it was a mistake But even then, go back and look at the supposed size and mass of Pluto listed in books published in the '50s to those out today, and you can watch it shrink in size from something larger than Mars to something as small as our moon. (Note also how Ceres was going to get lumped into this redefinition, even though two centuries ago, during the first round of discovery of a new class of objects, it was never considered to be a planet. Under normal circumstances, that's a good sign that an effort is flawed.)

As for "Vulcan", see In Search of Planet Vulcan by Baum and Sheehan, for a history of that exercise in wishful thinking and mistaken identity.

They were before continental drift got to them...

The Vulcan that Mr. Spock and T'Pol and rest of the gang are from is 16 lightyears from Earth in the 40 Eridani system.

For those who don't know, Vulcan was supposed to be planet closer to the sun than Mercury. It was so close the sun it could not be seen by the naked eye. There were supposed to have been occassional sightings by astronomers in the 19th century and then all traces mysteriously disappeared - like the canals on Mars. I remember this from one of those A&E type science mystery specials. I had no idea astrologers were claiming it exists.