The Wake

If you were beyond devastated upon hearing that Pluto was recently demoted to dwarf-planet status, you are not alone. On Sept. 14, in the first of a weekly series of events hosted by the University’s Institute for Advanced Study, Pluto admirers came from far and wide to mourn the loss of their beloved planet.

The series of events, titled “Thursdays at 4:00,” selected Terry Jones as their first speaker. Jones has been working in the University’s astronomy department since 1982 and sought to provide information about Pluto’s discovery, its brief stint as a planet and why it got the boot.

In 1929, Kansas farmer Clyde Tombaugh was hired by the Lowell Observatory to search for the ninth planet. After less than a year of searching, Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Differing from the other eight planets, Pluto was much smaller in size and had an irregular orbit.

In the years that followed, many similar objects were discovered in the solar system. As Jones stated, it’s “not a recent notion that Pluto isn’t a planet.” However, all was going well for Pluto until early 2001, when the Hayden Planetarium removed Pluto from its display of the major planets, re-labeling Pluto a Kuiper Belt object.

Since Hayden Planetarium’s evil deed, scientists and astronomers alike have debated whether Pluto should remain as one of the nine planets. Earlier this summer, the International Astronomical Union was called on to decide once and for all the status of Pluto.

In August, the IAU met in Prague and defined a planet as having sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium. This is basically an overly scientific way of saying that a planet must be round (or nearly round) to be in this much sought-after category.

Pluto’s status was the IAU’s main concern when redefining what constitutes a planet. But based on their definition, anything in the solar system that is nearly round can be classified as a planet. So responding to fury and outrage by other scientists, the IAU added another criteria to their definition saying a planet must dynamically control its local orbit and sweep it clean of smaller objects. There goes Pluto.

And not only did Pluto get booted from the solar system, the IAU didn’t even allow Pluto the dignity of giving it a new title. As for now, Pluto resides with many other bodies in a group temporarily referred to as “trans-Neptunian-objects.”

But here is the real kicker. In January 2006, NASA launched its New Horizons spacecraft in a first-ever mission to Pluto. In honor of the 100th anniversary of its discoverer’s birth, the spacecraft is carrying some of Tombaugh’s ashes. New Horizons is predicted to land on Pluto sometime during the year 2015. I bet Tombaugh didn’t plan on spending an eternity on a “trans-Neptunian-object.”

Jones expressed his remorse by saying, “Science has to change, it has to progress.” Many others are surely grieving with him. On the other hand, University senior Jose Rivera sums up his feelings by stating, “I don’t care that much about Pluto.” I think he speaks for us all.