This week, I’m going to say a few words about something you cannot see from your back yard. Well, you can, but only as a really, really tiny dot. Even the world’s largest telescopes see a really, really tiny dot. Not back yard material, but I don’t care. I’m talking about it anyway.
I can’t tell you how impressed I am that the publisher of The News Review had the foresight to put out this paper on the 86th anniversary of Pluto’s discovery. Your timing, Sir, is impeccable.
Pluto was discovered on February 18th, 1930 by 23 year old American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh (1906-1997). Clyde was employed by the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, after they saw his planetary sketches made through his home made telescopes back on the farm in Kansas. His job was to pick up on deceased astronomer Percival Lowell’s search for ‘Planet X’, a yet unseen mysterious body that affected the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. It took him a year, but he found it.
Pluto, named after the Greek god of the underworld by an 11 year old girl in Oxford, England, caught on. Pluto was the ninth planet, and everyone appeared good with that. Almost.
From the start, it was noted that although Pluto met the definition of a planet as to orbit and shape, it apparently failed to aggressively clear it’s orbit of other debris. So what, I say? Even the band Meat Loaf knew that ‘Two Out of Three ain’t Bad’.
But some people just won’t let go, so when an object larger than Pluto was discovered in 2005, it took the International Astronomical Union (IAU), the group responsible for naming things in space, less than a year to re-write the definition of a planet and effectively exclude Pluto. Some people have no sense of tradition.
So, Pluto is now officially a Dwarf Planet (sounds derogatory, but maybe it’s just me). Still, a long-planned mission to fly a spacecraft to Pluto went through: on July 14, 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft shot past Pluto, and is now busy returning some great photographs and scientific data over the 5.5 light-hours distance back to the Earth. A nice touch: mission scientists asked Tombaugh’s permission to ‘visit his planet’ at the beginning of planning, and as Tombaugh was deceased at the time of the 2006 launch, the spacecraft carries some of his ashes. That, IAU, is respect; something you could use a little work on.
Anyway, I may be an old sentimentalist, but it will always be a planet to me.
This week, Pluto rises at 6 a.m., an hour before Venus and Mercury, but you can’t see it because it’s really, really dim. I don’t care; I know it’s there.
Happy Anniversary, Pluto. Really sorry about the demotion.
