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.