Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion Not-Quite-Science Forum Pluto's planethood

A highly amusing opinion piece, from the NYT:

August 23, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
I ♥ Pluto
By TIM KREIDER
Charlestown, Md.

MY love for our picked-on ninth planet is deeply, perhaps embarrassingly, personal.

I took my first public stand on Pluto?s taxonomical fate when I addressed the Forum on Outer Planetary Exploration in 2001 (don?t ask why a cartoonist was addressing astronomers ? it?s a long story).

I informed the assembled scientists that, first of all, no way was I or anyone else about to un-memorize anything we?d already been forced to learn in elementary school. More important, I felt sure that, as former children, we all instinctively respected the principle: no do-overs.

Planets, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, and you can?t blithely oust them no matter how eccentric, skewed or unqualified they may prove to be. If they could kick out Pluto, I warned, they could do it to anything, or anyone.

I admit: it?s a highly emotional issue and maybe I got carried away in the heat of debate.

Even I was a little abashed last week when the International Astronomical Union tried to protect Pluto?s status by proposing an absurdly broad definition of planethood that encompasses moons, asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects ? in other words, pretty much any half-formed hunk of frozen crud that can pull itself together into a ball long enough to get photographed by the Hubble.

For longtime Pluto partisans, there was something almost punitive about this proposal: happy now?

I guess I always knew, in my heart, that Pluto didn?t ?belong.? Pluto is idiosyncratic ? neither a dull, domestic terrestrial planet nor a surly, vainglorious gas giant. It?s mostly ice. It?s smaller than our own Moon, and has an orbit so eccentric that it spends 20 years of its 248-year revolutionary period inside Neptune?s orbit. It?s tilted at a crazy 17-degree angle to the ecliptic, and its satellite, Charon, is so disproportionately large that it?s been called a double planet.

Pluto is what my old astronomy textbook rather judgmentally called a ?deviant,? and I?ve always felt a little defensive on its behalf.

I?ve long regarded Saturn?s misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked to anybody. Still, I just can?t stand by and watch as the solar system?s Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social ostracism.

All I really wanted was a little velvet-rope treatment for Pluto. I didn?t expect them to throw open the doors to all this Kuiper Belt riffraff.

It?s like that point when your party?s grown out of control and you look around and ask: Who are these people? Sedna? Xena? Ceres? Ceres is an asteroid, for God?s sake. Why not just make 1997 XF11 or Greenland or Harriet Meiers a planet?

And I am second to no one in my respect for Charon, but come on: it?s obviously Pluto?s moon.

Now they?re proposing to designate it a ?large companion,? which sounds like the sort of euphemistic legal status the court might grant to Oliver Hardy and can?t be doing Charon?s self-esteem one bit of good. ?Longtime companion? would have been more dignified and validating.

The solar system is a mess.

The situation this seems most similar to is the inextricably tangled social nightmare that is inviting people to your wedding. You truly want to invite your distant and eccentric but dear old friend Pluto, but this necessarily means inviting his horrible girlfriend, too, plus then maybe you?re obliged to invite all the other people you were both friends with in college, friends he?s still in contact with who will be offended if he?s invited and they?re not but who, frankly, are now boring people with whom you no longer have anything in common.

Some would suggest we just have to be harsh about this and not invite any of them, Pluto included. But these people are forgetting that we already sent Pluto an invitation, 76 years ago. Pluto has rented a tuxedo.

The astronomical union is to vote on Pluto tomorrow. But even as astronomers squabble, I remain confident that this whole wonky state of affairs will not be permanent. Eventually we?ll get it all sorted out.

For the record, I would accept a separate (but equal!) class of dwarves or planetoids, including Sedna and Xena. After all, the childhood mnemonic is easily amended: My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, Sans Xenophobia.

But what I really wish is that we?d just grandfather Pluto in and then close all the loopholes. Let?s do it, not for scientific reasons, but for sentimental ones.

As a friend of mine at NASA said, ?It would prove our humanity to let Pluto stay in.? It would be like that moment when the doorman is about to escort you out of a private party where you don?t, arguably, belong, but then someone who knows you taps him on the shoulder and says, ?Wait a minute, I know this guy. He?s O.K..?

A clever presentation.

The issue over what qualifies as a planet is proof, for me, that science is extremely hard pressed to admit to change. That problem has been noted by their own membership but they do not engage it much in debates.

How can a moon or satellite be considered a planet. Of course you could argue that all of the "planets" are satellites of the Sun but the Sun is the center of the system and is a Star so without it there would be no Solar System. Why not simply decide that all spherical objects that orbit the Sun in there own path are planets and all objects orbiting those planets are moons or satellites and are not planets. The main point is that the sphere is the product of the systems originating method and all non-spheres are not or are fractured parts of the effort to make spheres. It is likely that they will find a lot more large objects circulating the farther reaches of this system so we should not lock ourselves into some nearsighted definition that will require changing with the next discovery.
Much ado about nothing.
jjw

not engage it in debate? its been debated for decades. how can you say that they are not debating it? The problem is that different scientist have different opinions of what classifies as a planet. some have never accepted pluto as a planet, while others have long declaired cetes to be a planet. it not the lack of debate, its the fact that they are so adament about their beliefs.

dehammer:

You continue to interest me. You quote me:

"The issue over what qualifies as a planet is proof, for me, that science is extremely hard pressed to admit to change. That problem has been noted by their own membership but they do not engage it much in debates."

The point is not Pluto. That was a seperate Paragraph. The point is reluctance to change a viewpoint- they do not debate that issue as much as it deserves.

If you do not read what I say there is no point in making a response.
jjw

then please be more specific. it looked as though you said they did not debate over wheither pluto or other objects of that size are planets. They have been debating the criteria for defining planets for decades. some are even trying to call our moon a planet because its round.

Hi:
Knowing what you just told me how could you think I did not know Pluto was an old issue.
"The more one reads the more one learns".
A Quote from some nobody.
jjw

This is just about formalizing a definition.

I don't know what you mean by "extremely hard pressed to admit to change." Accepted scientific knowledge changes all the time. You may argue that it doesn't change fast enough, but it can also be argued that it SHOULDN'T change too fast, just to accomodate the latest notion.

i never said you did not know it was old, my problem with that was this.

.

the problem with pluto is the definition of a planet. they fact that it has been discussed, just like ceres has and xena has, is proof that they have "engaged it (the problem of what constitutes a planet) much in debate".

Uh-oh, this just in:

August 24, 2006
Astronomers Decide Pluto Is Not a Planet
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:38 a.m. ET

PRAGUE, Czech Republic (AP) -- Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is -- and isn't -- a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell -- a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings -- urged those who might be ''quite disappointed'' to look on the bright side.

''It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called 'planet' under which the dwarf planets exist,'' she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

The decision by the prestigious international group spells out the basic tests that celestial objects will have to meet before they can be considered for admission to the elite cosmic club.

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight ''classical'' planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Much-maligned Pluto doesn't make the grade under the new rules for a planet: ''a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a ... nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.''

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune's.

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of ''dwarf planets,'' similar to what long have been termed ''minor planets.'' The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun -- ''small solar system bodies,'' a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.

It was unclear how Pluto's demotion might affect the mission of NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which earlier this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.

The decision at a conference of 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries was a dramatic shift from just a week ago, when the group's leaders floated a proposal that would have reaffirmed Pluto's planetary status and made planets of its largest moon and two other objects.

That plan proved highly unpopular, splitting astronomers into factions and triggering days of sometimes combative debate that led to Pluto's undoing.

Now, two of the objects that at one point were cruising toward possible full-fledged planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology, has nicknamed ''Xena.''

Charon, the largest of Pluto's three moons, is no longer under consideration for any special designation.

Brown was pleased by the decision. He had argued that Pluto and similar bodies didn't deserve planet status, saying that would ''take the magic out of the solar system.''

''UB313 is the largest dwarf planet. That's kind of cool,'' he said.

Shakespeare had something to say about this too.

"Much ado about nothing."

Hi Soilguy:
Your observation:
"I don't know what you mean by "extremely hard pressed to admit to change." Accepted scientific knowledge changes all the time. You may argue that it doesn't change fast enough, but it can also be argued that it SHOULDN'T change too fast, just to accomodate the latest notion.

We will have our own view of such things. My thought, possibly ill conceived, relates to the harsh reviews and verbal abuse dumped on the new idea by the offerees peers. Later if and when it is shown to be a valid contention there is the utmost vacumn from any detractors, its like "Oh".

Dehammer:
I appreciate your alacrity in and of response.
There does not appear to be a worth while difference of view involved.
jjw

the bard does have much to say that is periodically revelant.

I know what you're talking about, but that's human nature. My final seminar in grad school included an unusual but minor (in my view) finding. It got one particular professor into a tizzy. Even though I wanted to punch him in the mouth, I successfully defended myself (though didn't change his mind).

I see no way around this. Some people have worked most of their professional lives on a particular corner of a discipline. When information comes out that suggests they were wrong, they're going to react emotionally as well as intellectually. If you want to change the accepted ideas, you're going to get flack.