Remember when we were growing up and there were more planets? We had a little one – way out there – named after a Disney character. Sure Pluto is also the Roman god of the Underworld, but don’t mess with childhood memories here ok? Well I am still adapting to recent scientific adaptations that have ripped Pluto away from us and added it instead to the Kuiper Belt. I wonder if that was named after Abraham Kuyper. Probably not, he spelled his name differently.
You might ask why I am thinking about Pluto on this snowy Monday morning in St Louis. Well let me try to explain. You should know first of all, that I am not a morning person. I have tried. All my life I have tried to become a morning person, but it doesn’t work. I prefer to sleep and have no human interaction for as late as possible in the day. But my preferences are insignificant. You know why? Because I have kids. I learned quickly that if you have kids, what you want doesn’t matter. I was reminded of the reality this morning at 7:00 when my son woke me from my wonderful stage four REM sleep to tell me that breakfast was ready.
Just a word of introduction to this point might be helpful. A couple of days ago, we were sitting on the couch flipping the channels and we stopped at the food network. Do you know the food network? Its a cable network all about cooking and making food look as nice as possible. It is porn for food. They do all this stuff that looks so good, but in the real world you can’t do it yourself and even if you did it might hurt you. But like all porn, it makes some people think and believe that they can live like actors on TV. After five minutes exposure to a chef slicing an Orange, Gage thinks he is a Gourmet Chef.
So at 7am when I am awoken and told to come to breakfast, I am presented with four french toast sticks (from the freezer to the microwave) on a bed of Syrup, garnished by 8 mini pancakes (again from the freezer). I gotta tell you it was good for a freezer breakfast, and he did a great job on the presentation (except my fork laying sideways across the plate soaking in syrup), but 7am just isn’t the time for me to eat alot, nor especially to be terribly enthusiastic about anything at all.
I did eat it all though, and I tried my best to be supportive and encouraging, though at times I found myself having to pause to let the blood come back to my brain.
As a part of his gourmet meal, Gage also brought out his old planet place mat. It is one of those vinyl rectangle things kids eat on. This one has the planets on it. He looked at it at one point and exclaimed that a trillion of our moons would fit into Jupiter. Of course most of the reason he said that was because there was a lull in the conversation. If you know Gage, a lull is an opportunity for speech. I look at the place mat with him and noticed that at the furthest point in the solar system was a planet called Neptune, and it reminded me of something that has been lost from my own childhood. I miss Pluto.
Go out and buy yourself another planets placemat. You’ll find plenty that still include Pluto. In fact, you don’t need to adapt to the demotion of Pluto because it was done by a tiny minority of the world’s astronomers and is heavily contested. Only four percent of the International Astronomical Union voted on the planet definition that demoted Pluto, and most of those are not planetary scientists. The decision was immediately opposed by an equal number of professional astronomers led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA’s New Horizons mission to Pluto. You can find the petition here: http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/planetprotest/
The planet definition the IAU adopted, the one that demoted Pluto, makes no linguistic sense for two reasons. One, it states that dwarf planets are not planets at all, something that makes no linguistic sense. Second, the IAU definition defines objects solely by where they are while ignoring what they are. If Earth were placed in Pluto’s orbit, according to the IAU, it would not be a planet either. These are among the reasons why this planet definition is likely to be overturned within the next few years.
To conclude, our solar system has more not, fewer planets, with the discovery of the new dwarf planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris.