On August 24th, 2006, people doing business as astronomers decided to define what a planet is and is not. Diminutive Pluto failed to meet their “you must have this much gravity to ride around this sun as a planet” requirement and was degraded.
Pluto was reduced to the title of a dwarf planet, which sounds insensitive to me, but I looked, and it is not. Midget planet would have been over the edge, but dwarf or even little planet is acceptable.
So, what if Pluto – speaking through an advocate – announced that it had transitioned to ‘Planet,’ dropping the dwarf? Would there be peaceful protests in favor of its new status? Would the science department and Penn State have to call it a planet or face disciplinary action?
Pluto would be able to use the Big Planets “room” again and all that. Full and equal rights that it might never have lost. As it turns out, the tiny planet consensus consisted of only 5% of astronomers, and some portion of the other 95% were less than thrilled.
“There’s a lot of leading planetary astronomers who are very upset about it,” said Skylar Grayson, an astrophysics Ph.D. student at Arizona State University.
The reclassification of Pluto also had a wide cultural impact as well. So much so that the American Dialect Society choose “plutoed” as 2006’s Word of the Year — meaning “to give someone or something a less important position than they had before.”
Regardless of what puny earthlings decide to call a consensus or Pluto, we’ve only known about the rock for 93 earth years. The planet itself, dwarf or otherwise, still has 155 years to go before it has completed one orbit since it was “discovered.”
Given how fickle human beings can be, it could still be a good “year” for Pluto, after all.
