By Staff
While you were out buying back-to-school clothes and new notebooks for fall classes, a relative handful of scientists ganged up in Prague Aug. 24 to strip Pluto of planet status.
Take that! teachers. Scramble to revise your lesson plans.
Their puzzling decision touches off the largest textbook reprinting project since the demise of the Soviet Union.
How embarrassing. Who knew that the dinkiest and most distant planet since 1930, was even on the chopping block until the announcement came that the solar system had been resized to exclude the ninth rock from the sun?
What headline news didn't tell you is how confusing they are making planets in the name of science marching on in the face of new facts.
In saying "eight is enough" with historic new galactic guidelines, something called the International Astronomical Union, just the week before had floated the idea of reaffirming Pluto's standing and perhaps adding three new planets.
Although 2,500 astronomers from 75 nations attended this conference, curiously, only 300 took part in such a momentous vote.
Sure, there's an emotional attachment to Pluto because we learn planets as children, and not just because he's Mickey Mouse's dog, but this reclassification drive doesn't seem real well thought-out.
Blame advances in powerful telescopes for this evolution in scientific understanding of the mysteries of our solar system.
"This is really all about science, which is all about getting new facts," said a professor of planetary science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped define "planet."
The new rules require a planet to not only orbit the sun and be large enough to assume a nearly round shape, but also to "clear the neighborhood around its orbit."
That disqualified Pluto.
Its oblong orbit overlaps Neptune's, leaving eight cosmic club members, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
Pluto may be demoted, but expect the debate to rage on.
"It's disappointing in a way, and confusing," said Patricia Tombaugh, 93, of Las Cruces, N.M., widow of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh.
Where it gets confusing is that the IAU, as official arbiter of heavenly objects, decreed that Pluto will be reclassified a "dwarf planet," along with two of the three objects that came close to realizing planethood: Ceres, an asteroid that had been a planet in the 19th century before it got demoted; and 2003 UB313, an icy object.
Since 2003 UB313 rolls so effortlessly off the tongue, discoverer Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology – not to be confused with the Bush administration official who did a "heckuva" job for FEMA – nicknamed it "Xena."
The third object is Charon, Pluto's largest moon.
NASA is still spending $700 million on the New Horizons spacecraft mission, which in 2006 began a 9 1/2-year journey to Pluto to unlock its secrets.
Pluto's demotion sounds like semantic hair-splitting.
Is a raincoat not also a coat?
A cell phone a phone?
Then is not a dwarf planet merely a kind of planet?
This will give star-gazers much to discuss when they return to astronomy class.