The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (16 page)
Read The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet Online
Authors: Neil deGrasse Tyson
Figure 7.2.
Varoujan Gorjian, who works on the Spitzer Space Telescope team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, marched in Pasadena’s Pluto memorial parade as the red planet.
Each planet in the precession was played by a different member of the Caltech community. The report continues, with a nepotistic account of Saturn and Earth:
Saturn, played by JPL postdoc Angelle Tanner and accompanied by her many rings, organized the march and voiced the sentiments of most of her fellow planets when she noted, “Most astronomers don’t think Pluto should be a planet, but we all miss it.” Some planets, however, felt strong-armed into participation—as trumpet-playing Earth (Samantha Lawler) noted, Saturn was “writing my recommendation letters.”
Caltech Professor of Planetary Astronomy Mike Brown was also there, of course, accompanied by his daughter Lilah, who portrayed Eris, Brown’s newly discovered queen of the Kuiper belt.
On August 17, 2006,
Brian O’Neill, of the
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, invented a behind-the-scenes account of Pluto’s demotion under the title “We See It as an Opportunity, Pluto.” Here he imagines a conversation between Pluto and the astronomer-manager who breaks the news to him:
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“Hey, Pluto, thanks for coming in today. Have a seat.”
“No, thanks. I’d rather hover.”
“Well, Ploot—I think I can call you ‘Ploot’—we’re going to make some changes in the solar system, and you’re going to be a big part of them.”
“Great. Anything I can do for you guys in the white lab coats. I was just telling Neptune on my way past him a couple of hundred years back that we’d be nowhere without…”
“Yes, well, this is about you and Neptune and the others. A bunch of us in the International Astronomical Union got together and decided that, well, you’re too special to be associated with the likes of Mercury and Mars.”
You can imagine where this is going as the astronomer eases Pluto into the idea that he is different from the rest of his coworkers. The piece ends with an almost cliché reference to office politics:
“Look, Ploot, we recognize you’re upset, but this is really just a lateral move, not a demotion. You’re still a very important part of our solar system, and we’re looking at other objects about your size that we may make part of your team.”
Some humorists felt compelled to parody cultural icons using the Pluto demotion story as a template. On MLB.com, the official Web site for Major League Baseball, Mark Newman, the enterprise editor for MLB.com, reported on the day of Pluto’s demotion under the header “Pluto Sent Down to the Minors: Former planet hurt by lack of size, disgruntled fan base.”
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In a lengthy article that surely contains more science than has ever appeared on the MLB Web pages, Newman included a paragraph on planetary batting order, remembering that nine players as well as nine planets are what’s supposed to constitute a team:
[Pluto] could never be Mercury, leading off and constantly hot. Venus was all about love and self-sacrifice, a natural 2 spot in the order. Earth, the prototypical No. 3 hitter, the ultimate fantasy pick, the people’s choice. Mars, the oft-feared big red machine. Jupiter always had the sweet spot in the lineup. Having Saturn in the order always meant a ring. Uranus, always the team prankster and playing jokes to keep it fun. Year after year, Pluto tried to leap past Neptune at the end of the order. Because of its eccentric orbit, Pluto actually was able to reach closer to the sun than Neptune during a portion of its orbit. But again and again, Neptune, the savvy veteran (discovered in 1846), would deny the kid. Pluto never really had a legitimate chance. The youngster with the cold streak also suffered from poor marketing.
Boston Globe
sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy could not resist comparisons with Red Sox slugger Manuel “Manny” Ramirez. In August 27, 2006 Shaughnessy wrote:
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More news yesterday from the International Astronomical Union general assembly in Prague. In the wake of their controversial decision to demote Pluto, the astronomers have agreed to officially recognize Planet Manny as the new ninth celestial body in our solar system. Makes sense. Planet Manny operates in his own orbit and hits baseballs into outer space. He’s certainly no dwarf planet like Pluto.
Continuing in the sports motif, the performance of the New York Knickerbocker basketball team (the “Knicks”) had been so disappointing in September of 2006 that political humorist Andy Borowitz, of the online
Borowitz Report
, found reference to Pluto irresistible under the title “Scientists Say Knicks Are No Longer a Basketball Team: Prague Conference Demotes New York Team to Dwarf Status.”
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The short article makes good use of academic innuendo as a tool to convey the frustrations felt by all fans of the team:
Just weeks after a conference of scientists determined that Pluto was not a planet after all, the same scientists reconvened in Prague today to pronounce that the New York Knicks were not a basketball team. Sports fans have suspected over the last few seasons that the original decision to characterize the Knicks as an actual NBA team may have been in error, but today’s announcement by the scientists seemed to remove all remaining shreds of doubt.
From here onward, you could substitute Pluto for Knicks, and basketball team for planet, and get a sense of the actual scientific debate as it unfolded:
“While the New York Knicks possess some qualities that are consistent with a basketball team, we have come to the conclusion that they are something else entirely,” said Dr. Hiroshi Kyosuke of the University of Tokyo.” It would be more accurate to call the Knicks a dwarf team. “Dr. Kyosuke said it was “understandable” that scientists had assumed that the Knicks were a basketball team for so many years, because they exhibited behavior similar to such teams, such as moving around a basketball court in a seemingly organized manner and hurling an orange spherical object.
And here Borowitz can’t be more blunt:
“However, they failed to exhibit two properties common to all basketball teams,” Dr. Kyosuke said. “Scoring points and winning games.” In New York, Knicks coach Isiah Thomas welcomed the reassessment of the Knicks, saying that being designated a dwarf team represented a unique opportunity for the franchise: “If this means that now we can play against actual dwarves, maybe we’ll start winning.”
Not limited to sports references, a month later, Andy Borowitz used the Pluto story to take a swipe at Washington, D.C., under the title “Scientists Demote Bush Presidency to Dwarf Status: White House Joins Pluto in New Classification.”
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Taking his cue from the November 2006 elections results, in which the Republican White House lost control of Congress, Borowitz observed:
In the aftermath of the midterm elections…scientists called an emergency meeting in Oslo to determine if the Bush administration in fact still qualified as a presidency…. But with the president’s approval rating in a free fall, it became clear even before the scientists convened that some sort of reclassification along the lines of the Pluto demotion was in order…. Dwarf status means that Mr. Bush is “less than a president, but more than a mayor.”
There’s nothing quite like the free New York–based weekly
The Onion
. Billed as “America’s Finest News Source,” the newspaper’s parodies are sharp, clever, hilarious, and written with such deadpan journalistic prose that half the time you find yourself double-checking to make sure that you had not accidentally picked up the
New York Times
or the
Washington Post
. In an article posted December 18, 2006, NASA was given the task of letting Pluto know of the IAU decision:
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B
EARER OF
B
AD
N
EWS
The
Consoler
probe braces to break the news to Pluto.
“It’s tough, but we thought giving it to Pluto straight was the right thing to do,” NASA Chief Engineer James Wood said. “After all, it put in 76 years as our ninth planet—it just didn’t seem fair to break the news with an impersonal radio transmission beamed from Earth.”
“Pluto is more than 3.5 billion miles from the sun,” Wood said. “Launching that probe felt like the best way to avoid alienating it any further.”
Appealing to modern-day issues regarding personal feelings and self-esteem, the article continues:
Wood said
Consoler
will “take pains” to explain to Pluto that the reasons for the demotion “had nothing to do with anything it did personally.”
Scientists at NASA have taken precautions that word of the demotion will not reach Pluto before
Consoler
does. The
New Horizons
probe, which will pass by Pluto in July 2015, has been instructed to maintain radio silence. It is, however, programmed to congratulate nearby Eris and Ceres for their promotion from asteroids to dwarf planets.
“The
Consoler
probe will reach Pluto on a Friday, if our calculations are correct,” Wood said. “It’s always better to do this kind of thing right before the weekend.”
Undaunted by the IAU vote, Maryn Smith, a 10-year-old fourth grader at Riverview Elementary School, in Great Falls, Montana, replied to a contest run by the National Geographic Society.
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The task? To construct an 11-planet mnemonic, restoring Pluto to its rightful place in the pantheon of planets and boldly adding a word for the lone spherical asteroid Ceres between Mars and Jupiter and a word for Eris at the end. She won with the sentence “My Very Exciting Magic Carpet Just Sailed Under Nine Palace Elephants,” citing the influence of Disney’s
Aladdin
, and just in time for a book to be published by National Geographic titled
11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System
.
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According to the Associated Press, singer-songwriter Lisa Loeb plans a song inspired by it, titled, of course, “My Very Exciting Magic Carpet.”
Defiance at its finest.
While astrophysicists were
downgrading the cosmic object we call Pluto, the American Dialect Society, which is more than a century old, was upgrading the status of the word Pluto to a verb, making it their 17th annual “Word of the Year” for 2006:
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to pluto / to be plutoed:
to demote or devalue someone or something, as happened to the former planet Pluto when the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union decided Pluto no longer met its definition of a planet.
The society counts linguists, grammarians, and assorted scholars among its members, who vote for fun and not as part of an official edict. Their goal is to analyze the language, assess trends in usage, and then induct fresh and emergent words into the English language.
Dictionaries are sure to adopt the new word, given the many occasions in life that one could use the term. The word “plutoed” also enjoys rhyme and resonance with the similarly defined word “torpedoed.”
Not missing a beat, NBC’s
Tonight Show
host Jay Leno reacted to the new word in his opening monologue on the night of January 19, 2007:
“I’m glad they chose Plutoed, instead of Uranused.”
The only way that joke works is to pronounce Uranus scatalogically as “your-anus,” which of course Jay did.
Meanwhile, those people in society who would credit or blame the cosmos, and not themselves, for their financial affairs and love life were split on what impact an official statement to demote Pluto would have on their horoscope casting. The day after the IAU vote, a story in the
Wall Street Journal
by Jane Spencer appeared, under the title “Pluto’s Demotion Divides Astrologers.” The widely reprinted article cites the American Federation of Astrologers and the Astrological Association of Great Britain as standing firmly by Pluto, asserting that the icy orb is a full-blown planet, maintaining a powerful pull on our psyche, despite the IAU vote to the contrary. Then comes my favorite line:
“Whether he’s a planet, an asteroid, or a radioactive matzo ball, Pluto has proven himself worthy of a permanent place in all horoscopes,” says Shelley Ackerman, columnist for the spirituality Web site Beliefnet.com.
The article goes on to quote Ms. Ackerman criticizing the IAU for not including astrologers in its decision. It further quotes Eric Francis, of Planetwaves.net, which represents a subgroup of these medieval prognosticators known as minor-planet astrologers: “This is a moment that I’ve been waiting for for a long time,” Francis remarks as he welcomes Ceres, Eris, and Charon to the ranks of dwarf planets, granting horoscope charts extra ways for believers to cede control of their lives to the universe.
The article ends with
Vanity Fair
astrologer Michael Lutin saying that he will consider the newcomers, but remains skeptical of their influence on our daily affairs due to their location at the outer reaches of the solar system: “UB313 is never going to tell you whether Wednesday is good for romance.” Actually, neither will anything else in the sky, unless it’s an asteroid headed toward Earth, scheduled to hit on Wednesday.
Please tell your children to stay in school.
