Editorial: Pluto’s new ‘dwarf’ status may yet be overturned

Last week we saw the spectacle of the world’s astronomers squabbling over whether Pluto is big enough to still be considered our ninth planet.

In this era of too much activist, agenda-pushing science that’s forever shouting “crisis,” it should serve as gentle reminder to non-academics that the scientific community isn’t always benignly devoted to seeking out life’s deeper truths; rather, its members can be as petty, sneaky, reckless and divisive as any other group.

This latest tempest in a universe-sized teapot came out of the 10-day meeting in Prague of the world’s top astronomical authority, the International Astronomic Union (IAU).

Acting in its role as astronomy’s official naming body since 1919, the IAU voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet, relegating it to the new, lesser status of “dwarf planet.”

Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery in 1930 by the late Clyde Tombaugh, a Kansas farmhand and amateur astronomer who worked his way up to a job at the private Lowell observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz. The moniker “Pluto” was chosen by an English schoolgirl fond of Roman mythology.

Joining Pluto in the IAU’s new “dwarf planet” category are three more smallish, spherical bodies in our solar system: Ceres (which is in orbit between Mars and Saturn); Pluto’s moon Charon (discovered in 1978); and the recently discovered “2003-UB313.”

The rocky 2003-UB313, in orbit beyond Pluto, is actually slightly larger. (Indicative of the high nerd quotient of professional astronomers, 2003-UB313 was quickly nicknamed Xena, after actress Lucy Lawless’s “Warrior Princess” character, and its largest moon named “Gabrielle,” after Xena’s subtly lesbian companion on the Ancient Greek-inspired fantasy TV show, which first aired in the 1990s.)

The IAU’s Pluto vote came after several days of heated debates, where four other classifications systems were rejected. For a couple of days it even looked like the IAU would call Xena, Charon and a third, even-more distant body planets, pushing the total for our solar system to 12.

On the traditional side of the argument, Pluto’s planetary qualities are obvious: it orbits the sun, is large enough to be round, and has an atmosphere and its own system of moons.

But in the end, the IAU reasoned that Pluto wasn’t a planet on the somewhat dubious grounds that its highly elliptical orbit, which crosses Neptune’s path, means Pluto hasn’t “cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.”

But a closer look shows the final vote wasn’t in the slightest bit representative of the astronomical community. Out of the world’s 10,000 or so professional astronomers, only 2,700 attended the conference, and just 424 actually stuck around till the last day to vote on the Pluto issue.

So, Pluto’s historic and hasty change of status was pushed by only 3% of the world’s professional astronomers.

Moreover, the vote appears to have been a kind of sneak attack by astronomy’s cranky dynamicist wing, who felt their views on Pluto had been pushed aside in favour of those held by the mellower, more traditional planetary geologists.

Owen Gingerich, who chaired the IAU’s planet definition committee, said the dynamicists’ “revolt” had raised “enough of a fuss to destroy the scientific integrity and subtlety” of the earlier resolution to raise the number of planets to 12.

Astronomer Alan Stern, head of the NASA’s Pluto exploration team, did not vote in Prague and told the BBC that Pluto’s new status is “an awful definition — it’s sloppy science and would never pass peer review.”

Astronomers opposed to Pluto’s demotion are already beginning to organize to get the spunky little rock reinstated to full planet status. Within days of the vote, pro-Pluto T-shirts and bumper stickers bearing such slogans as “honk if Pluto is still a planet” and “PLUTO 2006: Running as an Independent Candidate,” were selling swiftly on the Internet.

Meanwhile, the ashes of Pluto’s discoverer are now on a 9-year flight to Pluto on board NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which blasted off from Florida in January.

It’s anyone’s guess whether this sepulchral probe will end its long, solemn journey at a planet or a dwarf in July 2015.