Size Matters: Pluto Is Banished

Did you feel that? It was our universe getting smaller. Today the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to demote the Milky Way's most distant planet, Pluto, to "dwarf planet" status. That screech you heard was Clyde Tombaugh in his grave. He was the American astronomer who discovered the ninth planet of our solar system in 1930, or at least he thought he had. But in this age that lives by the slogan Question Authority, the IAU decided there was no authority when it came to defining what a planet is.

More than a year ago, feeling that the ninth planet was shrimpy, the IAU began a debate over the "planetary" status of Pluto. A panel of 19 astronomers was formed to discuss the issue. The discussion was necessary, of course, because of all the "radical" new discoveries since 1930, not the least of which being the discovery scientists have made regarding the near absolute license they now can take in tinkering with terminology. The debate over this icy ball was quite heated. No compromise position was reached among the panelists in over a year of haggling. The IAU regrouped and called back a smaller group of six who met behind closed doors (where was the hew and cry from the media over this sinister and archaic insistence upon privacy?) and created a new category, the dwarf planets. Or, the dwarf planet, given that Pluto is the only member of this lowly new category. Some preferred the designation of Plutons to describe all the "rubble" floating around the outer regions of space. Pluto would be included in this category. This certainly seems a lesser sentence than banishment. Slaves to melancholia that they are, the media are reporting this decision on Pluto as a demotion of Earth's most distant satrapy. No doubt the media view the IAU's decision as planetism of the worst sort. But looked at another way, Pluto has been elevated. After all, even though Pluto must suffer the politically incorrect indignation of being called a dwarf (Tolkein's Gimle did not change this), it is truly the only one in its class.

To give the media some credit, however, one must pause to reflect how odd it seems that an obscure and, until now, largely unknown body of scientists suddenly gathers together, takes a vote, and - poof! - our solar system now contains only 8 planets. (Imagine the cost of next year's textbooks, all of which will have to be bought new.) On what authority does the IAU act? Is the IAU's a voice from on high, spoken ex caelo? Why should any of us respect this announcement? Does it amount to anything more than an announcement? My guess is it does not. People like Pluto. It's a fun word to say. Try it. Pluto. Pluto. Say it aloud. Play with it a little...go on. Pluuuuuuuutoooooooo. It's fun. Personally I like Pluto just because of the name. Pluto reminds me of Plado. If you could get past the smell (which can only be described as toxic), those little yellow cans were full of colorful, creative fun (I never had any Plado of my own but my friends did and I made the most of it when I had the chance.) Of course, there's also the obvious Walt Disney connection, from back in the days when we could feel good and get sentimental about Walt Disney Productions. One astronomer from Northern Ireland, Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who made the official announcement of Pluto's excommunication held up a stuffed Pluto the dog under a red umbrella. "It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called 'planet' under which dwarf planets exist." Reporters report waves of laughter undulated through the room in Prague where the IAU gathered for this auspicious occasion. "Hails of derisive laughter, Bruce!" (If you don't get it, don't ask.) What I want to know is what are these pinheads laughing about? Where's the outrage?! This is nothing more than naked prejudice. I'm sure patriarchy is at the root of this debacle! Or some animus against the southwest. This is personal for us Arizonans. Pluto was dicovered by the 24 year-old Clyde Tombaugh while he was working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, a mere 200 miles north and approximately 5,500 - 6,000 feet in elevation from where I am now seated. Pluto is Arizona's contribution to the cosmos. Maybe they hate us because we're beautiful, with our clear skies and starry nights (that is, as long as you're about 129 stone's throws away from the Phoenix city limits, the city being so overdeveloped and, thus, overlit, not mention so smoggy that you're lucky if you can see Orion's belt.) I demand equality for all planetary bodies, especially the round ones with moons. Everyone, join with me! Let me hear you Arizona! Weeee shaalll ooovercoooooommme! Was anyone else's interest piqued by the incessant focus upon roundness in this debate? Next thing you know, the IAU will be probing Santa. Does his belly TRULY shake like a bowl full of jelly? Is a bowl full of jelly sufficiently round to be appropriately compared to Santa's belly? What exactly is the density and mass of Santa's belly? Does it dominate its environment? Perhaps we should redefine the word "belly." I hope they don't do that. I'm no Santa, but decades of determined beer drinking, almost entirely stouts and lagers, have gone into forming this delicately rounded shape I call my body. Keep your laws off my body, IAU!!!!

Strict definitions are still in progress but the IAU did make some firm statements on what qualifies a planet as a planet. A planet must orbit a star but not be a star itself. A planet must be large enough for its own gravity to pull it into a spherical shape. And a planet must have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." In other words, to be a planet, the object must have enough gravity to pull all debris into itself, thereby forming itself into a planet. So far so good for Pluto. However, there seems to be a problem with Pluto's orbit. It isn't round enough. It's oblong. Thus, it overlaps Neptune's orbit and is actually closer to the sun than Neptune during this time. So, Pluto is disqualified from planet status. Or, at least from adult planet status. It remains a planet apparently, but a different, newly "discovered" kind of planet, a dwarf planet. Which, I suppose, means that Pluto meets the roundness qualification but not the size qualification. There is another icy object flying around the outer limits of space called Xena. Xena was discovered in 2003 by Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology. Xena is not a planet either. It has the size, but lacks the roundness. But it was Xena, in part, that foiled Pluto's membership status in the galaxy. The real riddle here is the IAU's obsession with roundness and size. I wonder what the male/female representation of the IAU is. Freud would have a holiday with this one. The way I see it, if Clyde Tombaugh called it a planet, that's good enough for me. Much science in the latter half of the nineteenth century suggested something significant was there.

Perhaps there is something more pernicious going on at the IAU. Maybe the IAU is a secret society of Hell-deniers. The scientists who make up this organization, of course, know that in classical mythology Pluto is associated with Hades, the god of the underworld. The classical pagan's idea of the underworld was more lucidly developed in Judaism as Gehenna. In Christianity we speak of Hell. Certainly every card-carrying member of the IAU knows what foolishness such beliefs are. Since the Enlightenment, science has been about nothing if not proving the empirically non-evidential nature of these ideas.

Among the Olympians, Pluto is the third brother. His inheritance was the underworld, often called by his other name, Hades, or Tartarus. Edith Hamilton, in her classic book "Mythology," offers a description of Pluto as everything scientists despise. The underworld, represented by Pluto, "is vague, a shadowy place inhabited by shadows. Nothing is real there. The ghost's existence, if it can be called that, is like a miserable dream." Hades is the place "where the wicked are punished and the good rewarded." Much like our former Olympian in space, the mythological Pluto was reached only by a long and treacherous path. Hamilton, citing Virgil, writes that the "path down to it leads to where Acheron, river of woe, pours into Cocytus, the river of lamentation. An aged boatman named Charon ferries the souls of the dead across the water to the farther bank, where stands the adamantine gate to Tartarus (the name Virgil prefers.) ...On guard before the gate sits Cerberus, the three-headed, dragon-tailed dog, who permits all spirits to enter, but none to return." And after all that travail, "each one is brought before three judges, Rhadamanthus, Minos, and Aeacus, who pass sentence and send the wicked to everlasting torment and the good to a place of blessedness called the Elysian Fields." Passage to Pluto also costs money. "Charon will receive into his boat only the souls of those upon whose lips the passage money was placed when they died..." Surrounding Pluto's palace, which no poet endeavored to describe, are "wide wastes, wan and cold, and meadows of asphodel, presumably strange, pallid, ghostly flowers. We do not know anything more about it. The poets did not care to linger in that gloom-hidden abode." Neither, it seems, do modern astronomers. Pluto has, to a large extent, defied modern technology's demand to know. He has hidden himself from our probing cameras in shadow, ice, and distance. Unlike Saturn, brazenly showing off with his rings like a peacock seeking a mate, or even his neighbor Neptune who has entranced us with his mesmeric shades of beautiful azure, unduplicated anywhere on earth, even among the most pristine beaches of Hawaii, Pluto has remained largely shrouded in mystery. And mystery is an insult to the thinking of modern science. If the mystery cannot be debunked, it must be defined, or redefined, out of significance. The pagan Greeks' descriptions of their shadowy Pluto are more captivating after all these centuries because they get nearer the truth. And that is because the road taken is the road of imagination. We need shadowy, unknown places like Pluto in our universe. How sensible it seems to us who, like Hamlet, understand the mystifying truth that "there are more things in heaven and earth, International Astronomical Union, than are dreamt of in your philosophy" to imagine an opaquely lit, distant place far beneath the unknown recesses of the earth, as Homer describes it, where the ethereal, ghost-like spirits of the dead must go and make a reckoning of their lives. Contrary to popular belief, scientists like those who make up the IAU lack imagination precisely because they don't value it as a path to fruitful knowledge. They rely instead on technology. Like an ambitious, young journalist hot on the trail of a great rumored scandal involving a beloved and well respected member of society, determined to find out the sordid facts, scientists send their unimaginably expensive machines (built with our tax money and the ever-increasing tuition dollars of college students) off into space to probe the dark, unknown spaces of space, demanding to know what's there, what it's made of, and what its measurments are. Imagination is the path chosen by the solitary walker in the woods in Robert Frost's famous poem. The scientists path of technology is an asphalt road driving straight through a concrete tunnel. Pluto's insistence upon distance and darkness made that old Olympian an enemy of science which claims that if a thing can't be known in an elemental sense, it must be dismissed. No scientist wants to remain within a darkness he cannot explain.

It's not the decision, per se, that bothers me as much as the arbitrariness of it. The IAU is a small association far more insignificant and far less influential than the heavens upon which they have made their pronouncement. Perhaps astronomers were envious of their colleagues in biology getting all the attention. After all, if biologists like Peter Singer can muck about with definitions of human life, surely astronomers can rearrange definitions, too. Sadly, this is the ethos of scientific inquiry today. When a change in thinking is desired, for whatever reason, but that change cannot be effected scientifically in a credible fashion, in no small part due to the enduring power of imagination, simply activate the scientist's escape hatch. Invoke evolution. As Michael Shara of the American Museum of Natural History said in an interview with Jeffery Brown on the Jim Lehrer Newshour, "We ignore the current set of definitions of the evolution of the Solar System." He goes to some lengths to invoke a carte-blanche version of evolution. "That's what astrophysics is all about, and that's what we want the third or eigth or tenth graders to understand, that there's an evolutionary process, that there is evolution actively at work here." It remains unclear where this evolution is precisely taking place. Is it occurring in space, or is it simply the current mood of astronomy creating a sudden need for a new definitional understanding of planets? Shara's comments seem defensive. The astrophysicist doth protest too much. Shara agrees with the decision to excommunicate Pluto from the panoply of planets. He seems to be hinting at what Catholics would call Tradition. But the key word in his statement is "current." In other words, definitions are never static. While I understand this viz. the nature of discovery, this doesn't seem to be the case with Pluto. The IAU, which should offer the most help in understanding these new understandings, has remained smugly reticent about the claimed "radical" new discoveries that undermine Pluto's nearly century-long status as a planet. And suddenly upending the common understanding of what a planet is and calling it evolution is disingenuous. Indeed, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, who was also part of the same Newshour interview, offered this riposte to Shara. "...to craft a definition around how something evolves is something that would probably be very short-lived." Perhaps, in 50 years, the IAU will realize that its predecessors made a mistake and reinstall Pluto as the Miky Way's ninth planet. Or, perhaps the IAU will continue finding evolution so industriously at work on its definitions that the solar system will eventually be totally unoccuppied by planets at all. Definitions are always the trip-wire for progress. Far from discovering that things actually ARE something, science seems to favor a nominalist approach to phenomena. Thus, new categories can be created to fit the needs of progress. Yet, nominalism is simply mystery stripped of imagination. Ergo, "dwarf planet." And just like that, by fiat, a century of scientific belief and what was probably the greatest achievement of Clyde Tombaugh's professional life is undone.

And so we must bid farewell to mysterious Pluto, that place both real and imagined, a potent mix of fire and ice. Science says you are no longer worthy of your Olympian birthright. You mystified us too long. You've conjured up too many half-formed thoughts of mortality and judgment, hidden behind the veil of poetry. Your created, sacramental place has been revoked by usurpers who have taken the throne of creation and subverted it into a crucible of uncreation. Alone now, apart from us, you must glide along your lonely oblong course through those dark distant regions, watching the rest of us from the gallery of space. Your only company, gloomy, hardened moons that will float about you continuously as harsh reminders of your bansihment. For brief spans of time, when you share a path with your neighbor Neptune, you'll remind us how you once kept watch for us along the rim of the galaxy. Though not stripped completely of your status as planet, you are now a dwarf. Little more than a little star. Yet, be comforted. Little stars have played big roles in the story of the world. The voices of children through the ages can be heard singing sweetly a cheerful song about a little star as they fade into that deep sleep known only in childhood, while imagination and wonder fill their floating minds. And their singing will remind us, too. There are, indeed, more things in heaven and earth...

Twinkle, twinkle, little star;
How I wonder what you are!
Up above the world so high
Like a diamond in the sky,
Twinkle, twinkle, little star!
How I wonder what you are.

Requiescat Pluto.