Pluto and the Myth of a Planetary Status Vote
In the days since we got back from the events surrounding Pluto Encounter, I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of planetary status for our newly explored friend in the Kuiper Belt. I know a lot of people are signing petitions to get Pluto’s planetary status returned to “planet”, and at the same time the planetary scientists involved in New Horizons data are falling in love with Pluto and analyzing their treasure trove of actual, scientific information.
Of course, Pluto is the realm of planetary scientists. They’re the ones who have the qualifications to figure out what it is and what it’s doing. I’ve always thought that having a tiny percentage of people decide on something as fundamental as Pluto’s status when they weren’t all planetary scientists was the height of arrogance by the IAU. That organization encouraged a “vote” and a “decision” on something that had less to do with scientific inquiry and more (I suspect) to do with politics.
Since when do we VOTE on science facts? That’s a Republican Party kind of thing, sort of like voting to substitute myths for sound government policy, or to make pi equal to 3, or to reduce adult women to the legal equivalent of children when it comes to making their own scientific medical care decisions.
It’s a myth that you get to vote on planetary status. How is that scientific?
I mean, did IAU members vote on “star” or “galaxy”? What about “gravity”? Or “gas laws”? Or any of the other givens of science? Do they want to redefine Maxwell’s equations as “writings by some Scotsman”? They’d still be equations, right? Of course, that would be stupid. And arrogant. I dare say, if they decided that dwarf stars aren’t stars, the astronomers would be all over the IAU “leadership” like a cheap suit in nothing flat. It should be the same with “planet” and all its ramifications for what worlds are.
I’m not a member of IAU (they say no doctorate=no membership, no matter how well-educated in astronomy someone may be). So, I can look in from the outside and speculate about how silly it looked to vote on Pluto’s planetary status. As if it meant something to science.
Yes, I get that we use characteristics to define objects in the universe. Definitions are part of science. I get that and approve of it. But, voting on science? I don’t think so.
What’s important about Pluto is what that little world tells us. It’s a unique place. It has an evolutionary history that we’re still figuring out. It has mountains and an active atmosphere and ice flows and maybe even a subsurface ocean. Its processes are amazingly fascinating. And, it’s all happening in a place in the solar system where many scientists thought there might be just a dead world with an icy covering.
Pluto is the runaway surprise hit of the solar system. It’s bigger than our puny attempts to define it, to fit it into a single bin and forget about it. Pluto has something to show us, and is a HUGE piece in the puzzle of understanding our solar system and how ALL its components formed. THAT is something the IAU cannot take away.
So, let’s put this myth about voting over planetary status to rest. Let’s focus on what Pluto IS, and what it’s going to tell us. It’s opening the door to the third realm of the solar system. Like all those Europeans who once thought the Eastern shores of North America were all there was of the “new world”, the IAU can vote all it wants to define Pluto. But, I suspect Pluto will give us MORE than we ever expected. And, in the end science will win.
The IAU is the body that decides on nomenclature. It was well known that a decision was going to be made at this meeting. I think it sour grapes of those who either did not attend or left early to complain that they were left out. Keeping Pluto as a planet makes no sense. Most astronomers and planetary scientists understand that. It is Stern and his group and Lowell Observatory that are making most of the fuss. They clearly have a political stake in this. So who are the ones being political again?
You and your readers may find a little history and a non-political point of view of interest: http://theskyhound.blogspot.com/2015/07/all-these-worlds-are-ours-to-explore.html
I am quite aware of the circumstances of the vote and how things came down. And of IAU’s nomenclature responsibility. However, this has little to do with that responsibility, which did NOT take into account actual science. The IAU didn’t even take the recommendations of its own sitting committee on this issue. And, waiting until the last day, last hour of a meeting to do the vote was silly. There were politics involved, whether you like it or not. The planetary science community is the correct place where this should be decided, and blaming all of them for not being there is silly, as well. I’m sure you can do better than blaming the victim.
IF you have some ax to grind about that, or about Dr. Stern and the science teams and other planetary scientists who actually work in the field, please do go ahead and grind it on your own blog.
You did, however, miss the point of my writing here. Try again.
This is a message that needs to be heard by the public and especially by the mainstream media. Alan Stern described the IAU vote as “an embarrassment to astronomy.” The reporting on this issue was and remains an embarrassment to journalism. The media treated that vote as “gospel truth,” accepting without question that Pluto is no longer a planet because a small group says so, and continues to give the IAU position a priviliged status it does not deserve. Good journalism is reporting the controversy as the active debate it is, with two views that have equal scientific legitimacy. This is also true for publishers of encyclopedias and textbooks, some of whom literally withheld completion of their 2006-2007 editions until the IAU made its decision. They then completely ignored the fact that many planetary scientists rejected that decision, doing a disservice to readers, students, and the public.
This is what comes of situations when you allow “votes” on science. Silliness ensues.
Respectfully, I didn’t miss your point. I don’t believe that you have described the events of the IAU meeting and its circumstances objectively. In the end, the dynamical discriminant is an good solution to a difficult issue and that is what the IAU decision was based on. The dynamical discriminant is in fact science. I have read the papers, including those that try to take it apart, and in fact it stands up quite well.
Consensus in science developed through meticulous study and peer review is the way to go, not sneakily engineering a vote to approve a concept so grossly flawed and muddled that even naive laypeople can’t buy it and try to force it on the world like an edict. The least the media can do is present Pluto’s status as an ongoing scientific debate, which it is.
Pluto came to be seen as the largest member of a new class of objects, and some astronomers stopped referring to Pluto as a planet. Pluto’s eccentric and inclined orbit, while very unusual for a planet in the Solar System, fits in well with the other KBOs.
Pluto’s eccentric and inclined orbit also fits in with the orbits of many exoplanets, some of which are much bigger and more massive than Jupiter. When it comes to composition and geological processes, Pluto fits in much better with the larger terrestrial planets. An object is more than its location; what it is is far more significant than where it is. Pluto is the largest in a new class of PLANETS, the dwarf planets. All these reasons are why many astronomers never stopped referring to Pluto as a planet.
Agree. It will be interesting to see the turns that planetary science takes as researchers figure out the dynamical evolution of the solar system based on what we learn from Pluto.