Last Leg of the Journey
Cheryl Unruh
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
WHEN I LEFT you last week, Dave and I were standing in Silent Land Cemetery near Spearville watching our friends Jim and Susie Aber fly a kite.
On a late-autumn weekend, along with the Abers, Dave and I had visited a dozen or so towns, including Cedar Point, Halstead and Greensburg, but the time had come to part ways. The Abers headed west to Colorado; Dave and I began our journey back to Emporia.
On a dirt road in Hodgeman County, Dave and I came across the ghost town of Orwell. We found a caved-in brick building and a handful of homes nearby.
At Orwell, an old yellow road sign read, “Winding road next 7 miles.”
Western Kansas abides by the grid and so you expect nothing but straight roads.
You do still need a steering wheel out here — for those 90-degree corners — but finding a curvy road in Western Kansas is always a pleasant surprise.
The pasture wears a crew cut; grass is low to the ground. Roads are made of dirt and sand, ditches are shallow.
The view is long and lean and the horizon flat and wide. This is my neck of the woods, er, neck of the plains.
Yes, this is the landscape that tells me I’m home. And the towns are familiar: Hanston, Haviland, Bucklin, Mullinville. These are all towns that Pawnee Rock High School (and Junior High) used to play in sports.
Hanston (pop. 259) has a high school that looks fairly new. It always makes my heart happy to see new school buildings in rural Kansas — as so many of them are closed and abandoned.
The nearby elementary school is older, with an art deco design. It’s a white building with pink trim. Carved above the doorway is “Grade School,” shaded in pink.
Among other businesses, Hanston has an auto parts store and Bruce’s Country Kitchen.
Dave and I followed K-156 to another town Pawnee Rock played in sports. Every time I hear the name Burdett, I can still hear the Pawnee Rock cheerleaders chant: “Rock ‘em, sock ‘em, beat Burdett.”
But sometime during the ‘70s, Burdett and Rozel combined schools and became Pawnee Heights.
I had been looking forward to visiting Burdett (pop. 256) because it was the boyhood home of Clyde Tombaugh, Kansas’ most famous astronomer.
Tombaugh was born in Illinois in 1906. His family moved to the star-covered Kansas prairie when he was a youngster.
With nothing above him but wide open sky, Tombaugh built his own telescopes when he was just a kid on the farm. Later, in New Mexico in 1930, he picked Pluto out of the splash of stars.
And, as you all know, Pluto remained Planet No. 9 in our happy solar system until August 24, 2006, when the International Astronomical Union demoted it to a dwarf planet.
It was a dark day for Kansans, and I imagine a dark day in Burdett.
But, as my friend Janet Fish said, “(Pluto) doesn’t have to be a planet. It can just be a deeply meaningful celestial body.”
Burdett maintains a roadside historical marker recognizing Tombaugh. There’s a sign telling about the man and his discovery.
Next to the marker is a shaded picnic table. It’s a nice roadside stop where families can enjoy a meal while celebrating our star-gazing Kansas celebrity, Clyde Tombaugh.
On to Rozel (pop. 182). The town’s name is emblazoned on the white elevator in large letters so crisp and clean that you can read them a quarter-mile away on K-156. Dave and I stopped to photograph a mountain of milo, piled on the ground.
The grain looked like sand art. Each truckload had left a different shade of milo in swirls of tan, yellow, orange and rust — bright and beautiful colors against the bold and blue Kansas sky.
Cheryl Unruh can be reached at cheryl@flyoverpeople.net.
laurele (anonymous) says...
Pluto IS a planet because unlike most objects in the Kuiper Belt, it has attained hydrostatic equilibrium, meaning it has enough self-gravity to have pulled itself into a round shape. When an object is large enough for this to happen, it becomes differentiated with core, mantle, and crust, just like Earth and the larger planets, and develops the same geological processes as the larger planets, processes that inert asteroids and most KBOs do not have.
Not distinguishing between shapeless asteroids and objects whose composition clearly makes them planets is a disservice and is sloppy science.
As of now, there are three other KBOs that meet this criterion and therefore should be classified as planets—Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. Only one KBO has been found to be larger than Pluto, and that is Eris.
The IAU definition makes no linguistic sense, as it states that dwarf planets are not planets at all. That’s like saying a grizzly bear is not a bear. Second, it defines objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were placed in Pluto’s orbit, by the IAU definition, it would not be a planet. That is because the further away an object is from its parent star, the more difficulty it will have in clearing its orbit.
Significantly, this definition was adopted by only four percent of the IAU, most of whom are not planetary scientists. No absentee voting was allowed. It was done so in a highly controversial process that violated the IAU’s own bylaws, and it was immediately opposed by a petition of 300 professional astronomers saying they will not use the new definition, which they described accurately as “sloppy.” Also significant is the fact that many planetary scientists are not IAU members and therefore had no say in this matter at all.
Many believe we should keep the term planet broad to encompass any non-self-luminous spheroidal object orbiting a star.
We can distinguish different types of planets with subcategories such as terrestrial planets, gas giants, ice giants, dwarf planets, super Earths, hot Jupiters, etc.
We should be broadening, not narrowing our concept of planet as more objects are being discovered in this and other solar systems.
In a 2000 paper, Dr. Alan Stern and Dr. Hal Levison distinguish two types of planets—the gravitationally dominant ones and the smaller ones that are not gravitationally dominant. However, they never say that objects in the latter category are not planets.
I attended the Great Planet Debate, which actually took place in August 2008, and there was a strong consensus there that a broader, more encompassing planet definition is needed. I encourage anyone interested to listen to and view the conference proceedings at http://gpd.jhuapl.edu/ You can also read more about this issue on my blog at http://laurele.livejournal.com
You can find the petition of astronomers who rejected the demotion of Pluto at: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/pl...
December 30, 2008 at 5:39 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
cheryl (anonymous) says...
Wow, laurele, thanks for all the information!
And, oops, I see that I wrote that Tombaugh was in New Mexico when he discovered Pluto. Wrong. While he later lived and taught in New Mexico, his discovery of Pluto was at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, AZ.
December 30, 2008 at 6:22 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )
Happiness09 (anonymous) says...
Could we have all that info in plain English please. Good grief! I broke out in hives trying to read it.
December 31, 2008 at 9:27 a.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )