What if there were only six dwarfs?
What if there were only two little pigs?
What if Blitzen were dropped, by executive decree, from Santa's team?
You'd expect kids all over America to howl. Much as they did in 2006 when Pluto was demoted, by the International Astronomical Union, from the official list of planets.
Pluto was discovered 90 years ago Wednesday, on Feb. 18, 1930. But 14 years ago, it was reclassified as a "dwarf planet." From now on, the IAU decreed in 2006, there would be only eight planets.
They had, many would agree, science on their side. But science is one thing — and a million sentimental kids and parents who grew up with Pluto is another.
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"People resented it," said astronomy educator Gary Swangin, manager of the Panther Academy Planetarium in Paterson.
From all over America, children's letters poured into the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Pluto had been deep-sixed from its solar system models as early as 2000 — six years before the IAU's decree.
"You are missing planet Pluto," wrote one 7-year old. "It is a planet."
"I think Pluto is a planet. Why do you think Pluto is no longer a planet? I do not like your anser!!! Pluto is my faveret planet!!!" wrote another child.
Much of this hate mail was directed to Neil deGrasse Tyson, the celebrity astrophysicist and director of the museum's Rose Center for Earth and Space.
Tyson did not, of course, demote Pluto single-handedly. But he's been the most high-profile of the anti-Plutonians — the Cassius of the Pluto assassination.
"Just get over it," he told the audience on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" in 2017.
Some of Pluto's foes seemed to take a weird glee in bringing it down. "How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming," was the name of the book by astronomer Michael E. Brown, a key voice in the decision to reclassify Pluto.
This vindictive attitude — tongue-in-cheek or not — has brought about a backlash. And not just from kids.
Standing up for Pluto
In 2007, the state legislature of New Mexico declared a March 13 to be "Pluto is a Planet" day. Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, taught astronomy at New Mexico State University from 1955 to 1973. Pluto is still, legally, a planet — in New Mexico.
"Pluto is Missing! A Not-so-Planetary Musical," created by Bergenfield native Chris Mann, played at the People's Improv Theater in New York in 2017.
In his work as astronomy educator, Swangin — all these years later — still can't duck the Pluto questions. "I did a talk in the last year at a winery, and there were two people who were adamantly against the idea of making Pluto a dwarf planet," Swangin said. "They wanted to bring it back. What was wrong with keeping it a planet?
"After I gave my arguments, there was no problem," Swangin said. "But then afterwards, someone, a third person, came up and said, 'Very interesting, but I don't believe it.' "
No surprise, perhaps, that in the "fake news" era, people feel free to pick and choose their own science. But some experts, as well, have protested Pluto's fall from grace.
“In my view, Pluto is a planet,” NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said in 2019. “You can write that the NASA Administrator declared Pluto a planet once again. I’m sticking by that. It’s the way I learned it, and I’m committed to it."
All in all, a big fuss over a little piece of rock.
Pluto is less than 2,000 miles in diameter — about one-sixth the size of the Earth — and a dark, frigid 3.6 billion miles (on average) from the sun. But its tininess, and its loneliness, may be one reason that so many kids identify with it. Just as children often have a favorite dinosaur, so they often have a favorite planet. And for many, that planet is Pluto.
"There's something that draws children to Pluto," said Massachusetts folk musician Vance Gilbert, who grew up in Willingboro. "Pluto is out there all by itself. Kids that are alone and bullied care for Pluto It's out there on the fringes."
Gilbert, who has a science degree (biology), has released 13 albums. In 2008, two years after the fall of Pluto, he was moved to write a song called "Goodbye Pluto."
"Goodbye Pluto, being number nine was nice, So you lost your planetary status, now you're simply rocks and ice…"
"I wanted to illuminate the controversy because I found it interesting," Gilbert said.
Why the fall of Pluto? For that, you have to look at the rise of Pluto.
Seek, and you shall find
That story goes back to 1781, with the discovery of the seventh planet, Uranus. On closer observation, it was found to have an odd orbit — suggesting the gravitational pull of another, more distant body. That hypothetical planet was searched for, and duly discovered in 1846. It was christened Neptune.
When Neptune, too, was discovered to have a wonky orbit, it was only natural to assume that there was yet another planet, still further out, affecting it. "Planet X," it was dubbed by astronomer Percival Lowell in 1903.
"If there was a Neptune, there had to be something else," Swangin said. "That was the impetus in looking for a ninth planet."
For nearly 30 years, Lowell's "Planet X" was a holy grail, sought all over the sky by questing astronomers. But it wasn't until Feb. 18, 1930, that Clyde Tombaugh, a 23-year-old junior astronomer at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, compared two photos of a certain patch of stars, taken six days apart in January, and detected a "star" that had moved against its background.
On March 13, the triumphant news was telegraphed to Harvard University Observatory: Planet X had been discovered!
"It generated so much excitement," Swangin said."Now the solar system was larger, and that concept was incredible. It expanded the frontier."
To a world in economic chaos, Planet X was a happy distraction. It made headlines worldwide. People competed to name the new planet: Minerva, Cronos, Atlas, Zeus. It was an 11-year-old English schoolgirl, Venetia Burney, who suggested Pluto.
Soon after, in August, 1930, a Mickey Mouse cartoon called "The Chain Gang" introduced a new Disney character, a dog named — what else? — Pluto.
In the ensuing years of the space age, kids became more savvy about the planets. And every kid of the 1950s, '60s and '70s knew that the solar system began with Mercury and ended with Pluto. "Pluto has been called a planet so long that it's like second nature." Gilbert said.
Meanwhile, new scientific evidence was starting to emerge — data that would threaten, and finally topple, Pluto's reign.
Alas, poor Pluto
First, Pluto was discovered to be smaller than originally thought. Too small to be the "Planet X" that was warping Neptune's orbit. "Its mass was so insignificant it would not have had any effect," Swangin said.
Next, its orbit seemed very un-planetlike — sometimes moving within Neptune's orbit, so that it actually became, temporarily, the eighth planet. "Some people thought it might be a rogue moon that got away from the orbit of Neptune," Swangin said.
Then, in 1992, the Kuiper Belt (named after Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper) an enormous ribbon of orbiting debris, was confirmed to exist beyond Neptune. It included several other Pluto-like planetoids, including one, Eris — discovered in 2005 — that is more massive (denser, though still somewhat smaller) than Pluto.
What to do? Either the solar system now had to be expanded to include, potentially, a hundred Plutos. Or else, the definition of a planet had to be rethought.
Ultimately, the IAU decided that a bona-fide planet had to meet three requirements. "It has to be round, it has to go around the sun, and it can't go within anther planet's orbit — it can't share it's orbit with another body," Swangin said.
That last requirement, obviously, cuts Pluto out. But maybe it was intended to, Gilbert said. He wonders if these criteria were reverse-engineered, just to give Pluto the ax.
"It's potentially exclusionary," Gilbert said.
The controversy flared again in 2015, when NASA's New Horizons probe did a flyby of Pluto and revealed a remarkable world: a blue atmosphere, the largest known glacier in the solar system, and possible evidence of an internal water-ice ocean.
Surely, Pluto was too wonderful to be punished with a "dwarf planet" designation.
Only, of course, science doesn't deal in punishments — or value judgments of any kind. Whatever scientists call Pluto, it isn't personal.
"People want to make this more an emotional thing than a scientific thing," Swangin said.
"When Copernicus came out with the sun being the center of the universe, people resisted that notion," he said. "We have become used to having nine planets in the solar system. It's a resistance, not from a scientific point of view, but from custom or habit."
Jim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to his insightful reports about how you spend your leisure time, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.
Email: beckerman@northjersey.com Twitter: @jimbeckerman1
https://www.northjersey.com/story/entertainment/2020/02/13/pluto-planet-no-one-agrees/4707389002/
2020-02-13 13:43:00Z
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