The 27th annual meeting of the International Astronomical Union ended in Rio de Janeiro Thursday without a peep on its 2006 decision that made Pluto a planetoid, a demotion that still bothers many members of the venerable scientific organization and irks die-hard Plutocrats everywhere. — Associated Press
Dear Earth-things:
In light of our ongoing status as 'toid of the solar system, may we just say: Whatever.
We didn't care when Mr. Clyde Tombaugh labeled us Planet IX in 1930, and we don't care what you call us now. Won't change a thing, really. As the Illinois farm boy/legendary astronomer said near his death: "Call it what you want, it's still up there."
By the way, Pluto is still a planet by law in Illinois and Arizona, in spite of what the International Astronomical Union says. Those states haven't forgotten that plutonium's been "The Bomb" on your planet for 70 Earth years? Wow, we were a planet for a full 3.452857143 percent of a Pluton year. Your decision had us down in the dumps for at least 28 seconds.
We understand that you tend to want to put everything in the solar system in its place and keep it there. But a "dwarf" planet? Kind of a Mickey Mouse thing to do to a place named for Disney's dog.
Next we suppose you'll strip plutonium from your table of elements. Fine. A big, fat P-u to you, too.
Don't get us wrong. We don't begrudge your cosmic adventuring. It's really kind of noble in that small, yappy-dog-barking-at-everything-that-moves kind of way. Actually, you're portrayed by our political cartoonists as your lovable and myopic Mr. Magoo — yes, we're allowed non-Disney cartoons — who upon coming across several sheep and one horse in a pasture remarks, "Ha-ho, look, what a lovely herd of cows."
You see what you want to see, seems to us. Take the Caesars, for example. They worshipped those giant gas bags Neptune, Jupiter and Saturn as gods. They prayed to them, sacrificed stuff to them. They invoked them in their battles, saying things like "By Jupiter's hand, I shall …" Boy, the firmament really snapped to attention whenever that vow came over the transom. Fat lot of good it did for the Roman Empire.
Those planets are big, they've got moons everywhere, but they're not gods. You can look it up. But getting there took you guys longer than getting that Galileo was right. By the way, that ain't sticking either. A couple of brand new polls show that 18 percent of Americans can't say for sure if the sun revolves around the earth or the other way around.
News flash: The sun isn't hauled across the sky on a boat, either.
C'mon, we're just having a little fun out here in the cosmic peanut gallery. Stop taking yourselves so seriously. We never do. Decide we're too small, our orbit's too bumpy and our moons too big. Heck, decide there's a man in the moon for all we care. Doesn't change one little iota out here.
We don't give an E-I-E-I-O what the IAU decides. That's like assuming the sun follows one of your calendars. And just because your oh-so-precious planet-blue goes light and dark every 24 hours and Earth-things mark time passing doesn't mean you've figured out time, or that there is even such a thing.
As far as we're concerned, it's all just part of one long first day; the past is now and here to stay. Recognize that, and you'll have something.
By the way, the demotion came as no surprise to us. Sure, we're 3.5 billion miles away, but we're the only cosmic body of substance that you haven't sent one of your little metal spitballs past. Nothing says too tiny to matter better than that. Even your vaunted Hubble telescope has to squint to make us out. So?
And so what if some new blah-dee-blah-blah classifications set by some hawnyawkhoo-hahs say a full-fledged planet under the new rules isn't just a ball orbiting the sun, it has to be large enough to have become round due to the force of its own gravity.
We got round, we got three moons. Isn't that enough gravity for you? No, you ace us out with the tired old "size matters" red herring. Apparently, the new planet-eligibility standards dictate that we're not a planet because our length of year is too long and our moons are disproportionately larger to moons around the system.
We get it: Ever since Galileo pointed his beveled glass toward the stars, you get it right, get it wrong, but everything, bless your heart, still keeps revolving around you.
(With thanks for Plutoid factoids and sincere apologies to Denise Stephens, an assistant professor in Brigham Young University's Department of Physics and Astronomy, and to Patrick Wiggins, NASA's official solar-system ambassador to the Earth-things western U.S. sector.)
More information on Pluto
Clark Planetarium, Gateway, Salt Lake: www.clarkplanetarium.org/
Salt Lake Astronomical Society: slas.us/
"Pluto Confidential: An Insider Account of the Ongoing Battles Over the Status of Pluto," a just-published pro/against book by astronomers Steve Maran and Laurence Marschall.
Links:
Clare Muldaur, of Clare and the Reasons, puts the whole Pluto saga into song: www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12773509
An astronomer who voted to remove Pluto's planetary status still gets hate e-mails from school kids and NASA scientists: www.wksu.org/news/story/23082
e-mail: jthalman@desnews.com