The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet
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As if regional lawmakers had nothing better to do with their time, at least two state legislatures decided to take the Pluto problem into their own hands. New Mexico is longtime home of Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh and, with its clear nighttime skies, location to world-class astronomical facilities, including the Apache Point Observatory, the Very Large Array, the Magdalena Ridge Observatory, and the National Solar Observatory (located by the way in the town of Sunspot, New Mexico). The state legislature felt that the IAU had unjustifiably dissed Pluto and, by association, their great state. So on March 8, 2007, their 48th Legislature, in a bill introduced by Representative Joni Marie Gutierrez, passed a Joint Memorial declaring Pluto a planet within state borders and making March 13, 2007, “Pluto Planet Day” statewide. (See Appendix G for the full text.)
The bill is not all grumpy complaints. Under several of the various paragraphs that begin with the ubiquitous “Whereas…,” one learns a bit of astronomy in the process:
WHEREAS, Pluto has been recognized as a planet for seventy-five years; and
WHEREAS, Pluto’s average orbit is three billion six hundred ninety-five million nine hundred fifty thousand miles from the sun, and its diameter is approximately one thousand four hundred twenty-one miles; and
WHEREAS, Pluto has three moons known as Charon, Nix and Hydra; and
WHEREAS, a spacecraft called New Horizons was launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto in the year 2015;
What I don’t know is this: if I shout “Pluto is not a Planet!” in a public theater in New Mexico, could I get arrested?
California was apparently way ahead of New Mexico in Pluto legislation. Its state legislature had a bill ready to go on August 24, 2006, practically minutes after the demotional vote was cast in Prague. While it did not ultimately pass, the bill was enthusiastically introduced by Assembly Members Keith Richman and Joseph Canciamilla. Bill HR36 (see Appendix H for the full text) calls the International Astronomical Union “mean spirited” and formally condemns the IAU’s decision to strip Pluto of its planetary status for its “tremendous impact” on the people of California and the state’s “long term fiscal health.”
Tremendous impact on the people of California? It’s all there nestled within the multiple appearances of “Whereas…”:
WHEREAS, Downgrading Pluto’s status will cause psychological harm to some Californians who question their place in the universe and worry about the instability of universal constants;
Fiscal health of California? That’s there, too, couched in terms of the California educational system:
WHEREAS, The deletion of Pluto as a planet renders millions of text books, museum displays, and children’s refrigerator art projects obsolete, and represents a substantial unfunded mandate that must be paid by dwindling Proposition 98 education funds, thereby harming California’s children and widening its budget deficits;
How about shady politics?
WHEREAS, The downgrading of Pluto reduces the number of planets available for legislative leaders to hide redistricting legislation and other inconvenient political reform measures;
And then there’s the matter of Mickey’s pet:
WHEREAS, Pluto, named after the Roman God of the underworld and affectionately sharing the name of California’s most famous animated dog, has a special connection to California history and culture;
Unlike their own state’s legislature, the Disney Company of Burbank, California, accepted Pluto’s demotion to dwarf status with grace and aplomb. In an official internally distributed memo titled “Despite Planetary Downgrade, Pluto Is Still Disney’s ‘Dog Star,’” apparently issued by the Seven Dwarfs (who have been dwarfs from the beginning), they console Pluto in his time of need:38
Although we think it’s DOPEY that Pluto has been downgraded to a dwarf planet, which has made some people GRUMPY and others just SLEEPY, we are not BASHFUL in saying we would be HAPPY if Disney’s Pluto would join us as an 8th dwarf. We think this is just what the DOC ordered and is nothing to SNEEZE at.
The release continues:
As Mickey Mouse’s faithful companion, Pluto made his debut in 1930—the same year that scientists discovered what they believed was a ninth planet. Said a whitegloved, yellow-shoed source close to Disney’s top dog, “I think the whole thing is goofy. Pluto has never been interested in astronomy before, other than maybe an occasional howl at the moon.”
Remember that unlike canine Goofy, canine Pluto is a pet and so does not speak: hence the reference to Pluto howling at the Moon rather than offering an informed reaction to an inquiring press.
To Northeasterners, Californians have always looked (and behaved) a bit odd. In the days that followed the IAU vote to demote Pluto, Caltech media reported on a parade of a different kind through the streets of Pasadena:39
FUNERAL FOR A PLANET
Their heads hung low, accompanied by black-clad mourners and a jazz band, eight planets marched in a New Orleans–style funeral procession for Pluto in the 30th annual Pasadena Doo Dah Parade. They were joined by more than 1,500 parade participants, among which were the Marching Lumberjacks, guru Yogi Ramesh, Raelian devotees, the Zorthian nymph snake sisters, and the Men of Leisure and their Synchronized Napping Team, who stopped every now and then to recline.
The parade participants were mourning the open casket carrying Pluto:
Marching Lumberjack Karolyn Wyneken, who drove 700 miles from Humboldt County for the event, exclaimed, “Wow, that is awesome! That is so good, and necessary,” upon seeing the open casket with its papier-mâché Pluto.
Figure 7.2. Varoujan Gorjian, who works on the Spitzer Space Telescope team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, marched in Pasadena’s Pluto memorial parade as the red planet.
Each planet in the precession was played by a different member of the Caltech community. The report continues, with a nepotistic account of Saturn and Earth:
Saturn, played by JPL postdoc Angelle Tanner and accompanied by her many rings, organized the march and voiced the sentiments of most of her fellow planets when she noted, “Most astronomers don’t think Pluto should be a planet, but we all miss it.” Some planets, however, felt strong-armed into participation—as trumpet-playing Earth (Samantha Lawler) noted, Saturn was “writing my recommendation letters.”
Caltech Professor of Planetary Astronomy Mike Brown was also there, of course, accompanied by his daughter Lilah, who portrayed Eris, Brown’s newly discovered queen of the Kuiper belt.
On August 17, 2006, Brian O’Neill, of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, invented a behind-the-scenes account of Pluto’s demotion under the title “We See It as an Opportunity, Pluto.” Here he imagines a conversation between Pluto and the astronomer-manager who breaks the news to him:40
“Hey, Pluto, thanks for coming in today. Have a seat.”
“No, thanks. I’d rather hover.”
“Well, Ploot—I think I can call you ‘Ploot’—we’re going to make some changes in the solar system, and you’re going to be a big part of them.”
“Great. Anything I can do for you guys in the white lab coats. I was just telling Neptune on my way past him a couple of hundred years back that we’d be nowhere without…”
“Yes, well, this is about you and Neptune and the others. A bunch of us in the International Astronomical Union got together and decided that, well, you’re too special to be associated with the likes of Mercury and Mars.”
You can imagine where this is going as the astronomer eases Pluto into the idea that he is different from the rest of his coworkers. The piece ends with an almost cliché reference to office politics:
“Look, Ploot, we recognize you’re upset, but this is really just a lateral move, not a demotion. You’re still a very important part of our solar system, and we’re looking at other objects about your size that we may make part of your team.”
Some humorists felt compelled to parody cultural icons using the Pluto demotion story as a template. On MLB.com, the official Web site for Major League
Baseball, Mark Newman, the enterprise editor for MLB.com, reported on the day of Pluto’s demotion under the header “Pluto Sent Down to the Minors: Former planet hurt by lack of size, disgruntled fan base.”41 In a lengthy article that surely contains more science than has ever appeared on the MLB Web pages, Newman included a paragraph on planetary batting order, remembering that nine players as well as nine planets are what’s supposed to constitute a team:
[Pluto] could never be Mercury, leading off and constantly hot. Venus was all about love and self-sacrifice, a natural 2 spot in the order. Earth, the prototypical No. 3 hitter, the ultimate fantasy pick, the people’s choice. Mars, the oft-feared big red machine. Jupiter always had the sweet spot in the lineup. Having Saturn in the order always meant a ring. Uranus, always the team prankster and playing jokes to keep it fun. Year after year, Pluto tried to leap past Neptune at the end of the order. Because of its eccentric orbit, Pluto actually was able to reach closer to the sun than Neptune during a portion of its orbit. But again and again, Neptune, the savvy veteran (discovered in 1846), would deny the kid. Pluto never really had a legitimate chance. The youngster with the cold streak also suffered from poor marketing.
Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy could not resist comparisons with Red Sox slugger Manuel “Manny” Ramirez. In August 27, 2006 Shaughnessy wrote:42
More news yesterday from the International Astronomical Union general assembly in Prague. In the wake of their controversial decision to demote Pluto, the astronomers have agreed to officially recognize Planet Manny as the new ninth celestial body in our solar system. Makes sense. Planet Manny operates in his own orbit and hits baseballs into outer space. He’s certainly no dwarf planet like Pluto.
Continuing in the sports motif, the performance of the New York Knickerbocker basketball team (the “Knicks”) had been so disappointing in September of 2006 that political humorist Andy Borowitz, of the online Borowitz Report, found reference to Pluto irresistible under the title “Scientists Say Knicks Are No Longer a Basketball Team: Prague Conference Demotes New York Team to Dwarf Status.”43 The short article makes good use of academic innuendo as a tool to convey the frustrations felt by all fans of the team:
Just weeks after a conference of scientists determined that Pluto was not a planet after all, the same scientists reconvened in Prague today to pronounce that the New York Knicks were not a basketball team. Sports fans have suspected over the last few seasons that the original decision to characterize the Knicks as an actual NBA team may have been in error, but today’s announcement by the scientists seemed to remove all remaining shreds of doubt.
From here onward, you could substitute Pluto for Knicks, and basketball team for planet, and get a sense of the actual scientific debate as it unfolded:
“While the New York Knicks possess some qualities that are consistent with a basketball team, we have come to the conclusion that they are something else entirely,” said Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke of the University of Tokyo.” It would be more accurate to call the Knicks a dwarf team. “Dr. Kyosuke said it was “understandable” that scientists had assumed that the Knicks were a basketball team for so many years, because they exhibited behavior similar to such teams, such as moving around a basketball court in a seemingly organized manner and hurling an orange spherical object.
And here Borowitz can’t be more blunt:
“However, they failed to exhibit two properties common to all basketball teams,” Dr. Kyosuke said. “Scoring points and winning games.” In New York, Knicks coach Isiah Thomas welcomed the reassessment of the Knicks, saying that being designated a dwarf team represented a unique opportunity for the franchise: “If this means that now we can play against actual dwarves, maybe we’ll start winning.”
Not limited to sports references, a month later, Andy Borowitz used the Pluto story to take a swipe at Washington, D.C., under the title “Scientists Demote Bush Presidency to Dwarf Status: White House Joins Pluto in New Classification.” 44 Taking his cue from the November 2006 elections results, in which the Republican White House lost control of Congress, Borowitz observed:
In the aftermath of the midterm elections…scientists called an emergency meeting in Oslo to determine if the Bush administration in fact still qualified as a presidency…. But with the president’s approval rating in a free fall, it became clear even before the scientists convened that some sort of reclassification along the lines of the Pluto demotion was in order…. Dwarf status means that Mr. Bush is “less than a president, but more than a mayor.”
There’s nothing quite like the free New York–based weekly The Onion. Billed as “America’s Finest News Source,” the newspaper’s parodies are sharp, clever, hilarious, and written with such deadpan journalistic prose that half the time you find yourself double-checking to make sure that you had not accidentally picked up the New York Times or the Washington Post. In an article posted December 18, 2006, NASA was given the task of letting Pluto know of the IAU decision:45
BEARER OF BAD NEWS
The Consoler probe braces to break the news to Pluto.
“It’s tough, but we thought giving it to Pluto straight was the right thing to do,” NASA Chief Engineer James Wood said. “After all, it put in 76 years as our ninth planet—it just didn’t seem fair to break the news with an impersonal radio transmission beamed from Earth.”
“Pluto is more than 3.5 billion miles from the sun,” Wood said. “Launching that probe felt like the best way to avoid alienating it any further.”
Appealing to modern-day issues regarding personal feelings and self-esteem, the article continues:
Wood said Consoler will “take pains” to explain to Pluto that the reasons for the demotion “had nothing to do with anything it did personally.”
Scientists at NASA have taken precautions that word of the demotion will not reach Pluto before Consoler does. The New Horizons probe, which will pass by Pluto in July 2015, has been instructed to maintain radio silence. It is, however, programmed to congratulate nearby Eris and Ceres for their promotion from asteroids to dwarf planets.
“The Consoler probe will reach Pluto on a Friday, if our calculations are correct,” Wood said. “It’s always better to do this kind of thing right before the weekend.”
Undaunted by the IAU vote, Maryn Smith, a 10-year-old fourth grader at Riverview Elementary School, in Great Falls, Montana, replied to a contest run by the National Geographic Society.46 The task? To construct an 11-planet mnemonic, restoring Pluto to its rightful place in the pantheon of planets and boldly adding a word for the lone spherical asteroid Ceres between Mars and Jupiter and a word for Eris at the end. She won with the sentence “My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants,” citing the influence of Disney’s Aladdin, and just in time for a book to be published by National Geographic titled 11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System.47 According to the Associated Press, singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb plans a song inspired by it, titled, of course, “My Very Exciting Magic Carpet.”
Defiance at its finest.
While astrophysicists were downgrading the cosmic object we call Pluto, the American Dialect Society, which is more than a century old, was upgrading the status of the word Pluto to a verb, making it their 17th annual “Word of the Year” for 2006:48
to pluto / to be plutoed: to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.
The society counts linguists, grammarians, and assorted scholars among its members, who vote for fun and not as part of an official edict. Their goal is to analyze the language, assess trends in usage, and then induct fresh and emergent words into the English language.
Dictionaries are sure to adopt the new word, given the many occasions in life that one could use the term. The word “plutoed” also enjoys rhyme and resonance with the similarly defined word “torpedoed.”
Not missing
a beat, NBC’s Tonight Show host Jay Leno reacted to the new word in his opening monologue on the night of January 19, 2007:
“I’m glad they chose Plutoed, instead of Uranused.”
The only way that joke works is to pronounce Uranus scatalogically as “your-anus,” which of course Jay did.
Meanwhile, those people in society who would credit or blame the cosmos, and not themselves, for their financial affairs and love life were split on what impact an official statement to demote Pluto would have on their horoscope casting. The day after the IAU vote, a story in the Wall Street Journal by Jane Spencer appeared, under the title “Pluto’s Demotion Divides Astrologers.” The widely reprinted article cites the American Federation of Astrologers and the Astrological Association of Great Britain as standing firmly by Pluto, asserting that the icy orb is a full-blown planet, maintaining a powerful pull on our psyche, despite the IAU vote to the contrary. Then comes my favorite line:
“Whether he’s a planet, an asteroid, or a radioactive matzo ball, Pluto has proven himself worthy of a permanent place in all horoscopes,” says Shelley Ackerman, columnist for the spirituality Web site Beliefnet.com.
The article goes on to quote Ms. Ackerman criticizing the IAU for not including astrologers in its decision. It further quotes Eric Francis, of Planetwaves.net, which represents a subgroup of these medieval prognosticators known as minor-planet astrologers: “This is a moment that I’ve been waiting for for a long time,” Francis remarks as he welcomes Ceres, Eris, and Charon to the ranks of dwarf planets, granting horoscope charts extra ways for believers to cede control of their lives to the universe.
The article ends with Vanity Fair astrologer Michael Lutin saying that he will consider the newcomers, but remains skeptical of their influence on our daily affairs due to their location at the outer reaches of the solar system: “UB313 is never going to tell you whether Wednesday is good for romance.” Actually, neither will anything else in the sky, unless it’s an asteroid headed toward Earth, scheduled to hit on Wednesday.