March 7, 2009
Science Department
Pluto and the Final Stage of Grief
I'll tell you, I didn't have much Love for the Pluto haters. But I've come to accept the truth of it. Pluto crosses the orbit of Neptune, it's tilted out of the ecliptic, there's other crap all around it, and it's small---almost as small as its moon, which doesn't even orbit a point inside Pluto.
It's a rock. Just like all the other outer-system dwarf planets: Haumea, Makemake, and Xena.
Yeah, you heard me. I said Xena. If the discoverers called it Xena, then that's what it should be.
The television show Xena: Warrior Princess had more fans for any given episode than Makemake has had worshippers throughout all time. Admit it, until I mentioned it, you never even heard of Makemake. You're still not sure I didn't just make it up. So how come Makemake gets a (dwarf) planet and Xena doesn't?
The International Astronomical Union wants to call it "Eris," but they're headquartered in France, so we don't have to listen to them. Besides, haven't we named enough shit after those fucking Greeks already?
Hmm. This sounds more like Bargaining. Maybe I'm only at the third stage.
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Forget the stages, and forget the grief. Pluto is a planet. Only four percent of the IAU voted on the controversial demotion, most of whom are not planetary scientists, and their decision was opposed by hundreds of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto.
Crossing the orbit of Neptune does not disqualify Pluto from being a planet. At least three exoplanet systems have been found in which one giant planet crosses the orbit of another. If those objects, larger than Jupiter, aren't planets, what are they?
Being tilted to the ecliptic doesn't preclude an object from being a planet either. Many exoplanet systems have multiple planets with wildly eccentric orbits. In our own solar system, Mercury is also tilted to the ecliptic. Is Mercury not a planet?
Many scientists believe that as we find a greater diversity of objects in this and other solar systems, we should be broadening rather than narrowing the definition of planet. They define a planet as simply any non-self luminous spheroidal body orbiting a star. The spheroidal part is critical because it means the object is large enough to be pulled into a round shape by its own gravity--a characteristic of planets and not of asteroids or shapeless "space rocks."
Not only is Pluto a planet, but so are Ceres, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. Pluto's large moon Charon, half its size, could be also be considered a planet, as the center of gravity between Pluto and Charon lies between the two objects, meaning they orbit each other. That makes them the only binary planet system in our solar system.
You Sir/Madam are the enemy of confusion evreyhewre!