[meteorite-list] Pluto : from nyt ed. page

From: batkol <batkol_at_meteoritecentral.com>
Date: Wed Aug 23 08:19:26 2006
Message-ID: <004d01c6c6ae$5c113ac0$66a6d046_at_DJV2WH71>

 found this in the times. enjoy. take care
susan
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.."
Received on Wed 23 Aug 2006 08:19:17 AM PDT