SOMEHOW, I feel like we just lost a neighbor.
I know I’m being ridiculous. When Pluto was declared no longer a planet last week, the Earth didn’t stop spinning on its axis. Pluto itself wasn’t blown from the skies like a miniature Death Star. All that changed was a definition, one that’ll make some money for the textbook companies and the memorabilia dealers without any practical effect on the rest of us.
But I still feel cheated.
Yes, I’m a space geek. I grew up putting together model space shuttles and reading everything I could get my hands on about the Final Frontier. I remember watching a lunar eclipse with my Dad through a K-Mart telescope or photographing a solar eclipse through an oatmeal-box camera.
Space was cool. It still is.
I never learned all the cute memory-tricks for keeping the planets in order. Only later did a friend tell me about “My Very Elegant Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas” for Mercury, Venus, Earth and so on. For me, it was like needing a trick to remember your favorite baseball team. This was the starting nine for the Solar System, with frozen Pluto batting ninth in the pitcher’s spot.
Only now it’s not.
Part of what I’m feeling may be sentiment. More than part, probably. It’s a little like coming home to Colorado to find a favorite downtown business has closed while a new mega-mart sets up shop. It’s urban renewal on a planetary scale. A piece of childhood has changed forever.
Part of it, too, is that Pluto has always been the odd one out. Its first proponent, Percival Lowell, was known in part for theorizing that intelligent beings had built canals on Mars. Its eventual discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh of Kansas, had no formal astronomical training and found it in spite of its distant location and minuscule size.
It’s been defined as having no moons, then one, then three. Its orbit was found to be eccentric to say the least, causing it to flip-flop positions with Neptune every so often. It has been the planetary underdog, the little guy who’s kind of weird but somehow made it on the team. With that kind of heritage, it’s no wonder that public outcries kept the International Astronomical Union from “demoting” Pluto in 1999.
Since then, we’ve found a lot more stuff in Pluto’s neighborhood, including at least one object, called “Xena,” that has at least as strong a case for planetary status. That forced the IAU to consider definitions. In the end, Pluto was out — that unusual orbit just didn’t fit the new definition of what a planet should be.
I know, science and sentiment shouldn’t mix. But when you come down to it, definitions are arbitrary things. At the gray edges, it can be hard to separate a hill from a mountain, or a large island from a small continent. So would it kill anyone to leave Pluto’s status unchanged, even if it means having to introduce a few more planets into the club?
Bill Bryson put it well in his book “ A Short History of Nearly Everything,” when he praised the 1999 decision to keep Pluto. “The universe is a big and lonely place,” Bryson wrote. “We can do with all the neighbors we can get.”
Indeed.
Let’s not be foisted off with this second-class “dwarf planet” status. Pluto may be a small, insignificant iceball. But it’s our small, insignificant iceball.
There’s no reason to give it the cold shoulder.
Scott Rochat’s e-mail address is rochat@emporiagazette.com.