![]() Which brings us to that fateful meeting in Prague. “Pluto is not this oddball at the edge of the solar system Pluto is part of this larger population.” In 2000, when the American Museum of Natural History, in New York, opened a new space wing, curators tagged Pluto as part of the Kuiper belt, the disc of objects floating past Neptune, a decision that prompted a flurry of hate mail from Pluto fans. This is what Pluto is,” Mike Brown, a Caltech astronomer who discovered one of these celestial bodies, told me. “People who were paying attention immediately said, Oh, we get it. Then, in the 1990s, astronomers started finding icy objects beyond Neptune. And compared with the other planets, the specifics of its 248-year orbit were weird too. It was not, as Lowell had imagined, seven times more massive than Earth, but a tiny thing, smaller than the moon. Read: What’s so great about being a planet?īut Pluto quickly turned out to be different than they’d expected. Percival Lowell, the namesake of the Arizona observatory where Pluto was first photographed, had predicted that a ninth planet lurked somewhere deeper in the solar system, and Tombaugh and his colleagues believed they had found it. In 1801, astronomers deemed Ceres, a rocky object they had spotted between Mars and Jupiter, a planet, but 50 years later, after further observations, they designated it as an asteroid. Burney’s grandfather, a respected librarian, passed the suggestion along to the Lowell Observatory, in Arizona, where Tombaugh had made the discovery.īy that point, the definition of a planet had already experienced some shifts. Burney, just 11 years old, knew that the other planets were named after mythical figures, so she proposed the Roman god of the underworld: Pluto. In 1930, Burney’s grandfather read aloud the news that the American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh had discovered a mysterious planet beyond the orbit of Neptune, and wondered what it would be named. The story of what to call Pluto began during breakfast at Venetia Burney’s house in Oxford, England. They agree on so much about the cosmos, but on a matter that seems as though it should be straightforward, some of them might as well exist in two different solar systems. Ask another and they’ll say the matter desperately needs a do-over. Ask one astronomer and they’ll sigh, before saying that it’s time to stop dredging up the past and move on. There was no consensus among them then, and there is none now. This week marks 15 years since that meeting, and people still feel some way about Pluto-including the people who actually work in astronomy. ![]() Poor Pluto hadn’t even completed a full orbit around the sun between the time of its discovery and the occasion of its downgrade. Our sappy human brains and their tendency to anthropomorphize inanimate objects kicked in. It didn’t help that the decision to give Pluto a new designation-dwarf planet-was described in the press as a “demotion,” even though the announcement from the International Astronomical Union, the organization that held the vote, said nothing of the sort. Despite the millions of miles that separate us, the planets feel close to home, and the news that one of them had been kicked out of the group felt a bit destabilizing. For many Americans, the names of planets were some of the earliest scientific facts we learned, and that there were nine of them seemed like a basic truth of existence. The wider public doesn’t usually get riled up about the solar system, but this decision was quite shocking. Under the new rules of planethood, the solar system had eight planets, and Pluto wasn’t one of them. In 2006, astronomers gathered in Prague to consider a very basic question: How many planets are in our solar system? Was it nine, or was it actually eight, or perhaps as many as 12? By the end of the conference, after several polite debates and “ lots of heated hallway discussions,” the verdict was in.
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