Publication: Daedalus
Publication Date: 01-JAN-07
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Jewitt, David ; Luu, Jane X.
Article Excerpt
Last summer, in Prague, members of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) voted to remove Pluto from the list of planets. It is not a major planet like our own Earth, or Mars, or Jupiter, they declared; it is instead a 'dwarf planet' along with several other diminutive but approximately round bodies in orbit about the sun. Apparently adding insult to injury, the IAU's Minor Planet Center promptly assigned Pluto a number, as they routinely do for run-of-the-mill asteroids. From now on, Pluto is 134340.
Pluto's loss of planetary status, while pleasing to the many astronomers who have long viewed Pluto as a planetary usurper, has enraged others. Dark rumors of a revolution at the IAU swirl on the Internet, and pro-Pluto political action groups have formed. Pluto's reclassification has also bemused science writers and the general public, many of whom believe planethood is Pluto's right, not to be cruelly snatched away by mean-spirited astronomers. The dusty world of the IAU has never been racked by so much controversy.
Astronomers will study Pluto just the same whatever it is called: a planet, an ex-planet, or a dwarf--it doesn't matter. In this sense, Pluto's removal from the list of planets is inconsequential. So what is behind the abnormally high level of interest and, in some quarters, the almost pathological passion aroused by Pluto's reclassification?
It turns out that the answer to this question is deep. The reaction to Pluto's demotion tells us little about Pluto, but a lot about the public perception of science, and about the role of politics and public relations in modern planetary astronomy.
Astronomers have known since 1992 that Pluto is not alone. It orbits the sun along with a vast number of cohorts in the frozen realms beyond Neptune. This region, now widely known as the Kuiper Belt, contains bodies consisting mostly of ice and rock, like dirty snowballs trapped in the solar system's deep freeze. More than a thousand Kuiper Belt objects (KBOs) have been identified as a result of prodigious search efforts. Based on these discoveries, we can predict some seventy thousand KBOs larger than 100 kilometers in size, and tens, even hundreds, of millions of KBOs measured down to 1 kilometer in size. The new discoveries show that the Kuiper Belt is a ring-like assemblage of bodies extending roughly from Neptune's orbit at 30 astronomical units (AU; 1 AU is the average distance between the Earth and the sun)...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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