To Pluto

“Honk if you love Pluto” declares the T-shirt. Not too dissimilar from the ones promoting honking for Jesus. And, like so often happens with discussing heavenly bodies, the Pluto debate is up and raging. The International Astronomy Union (IAU) meeting in Prague last month adopted a new definition of a planet – one that knocked Pluto out of the club.

Living on the extremities of planetary imagination - even with the Hubble Space Telescope it is still merely a bleary sphere in shades of grey - Pluto didn’t join the club until 1930. That was the year when a 24-year-old American by the name of Clyde Tombaugh mapped movement where movement had not been mapped before. A young girl from Oxfordshire suggested the name of Pluto, Roman God of the Underworld. Beyond Pluto was the abyss of unknowing.

Since the 1930s Pluto has shrunk. With each advance in technology Pluto’s measurements have diminished. It’s now smaller than our moon. Hence the T-shirts, without the honking, that proclaim ‘size doesn’t matter!’ and ‘is a dachshund not a dog?’

What does matter to the astronomical elites is the discovery in the 1990s of other Pluto-like bodies on the edge of our telescopic vision. And not just one, or five, but hundreds, and probably thousands!

This naming debate has spilled over into popular consciousness. The public wanted a voice. Pluto was not just a bleary dot out in space it is something people love. It inspired and inspires myths, art, and poetry. It is part of astrology charts – ‘Pluto direct’ is a way of talking about transformational energy. Kids identify with Pluto’s smallness. In particular adults who forlornly hope that ‘whatever has been will forever be’ find its demotion out of the Big Nine major league of planets difficult to accept.

The pragmatists of astronomy suggest that instead of knocking Pluto out of the club that the IAU change the rules. In other words expand the definition of planet to include not only the eight and Pluto but also Eris [formerly known as Xena] and Ceres. The purists though argue that this will open the doors to hundreds maybe millions of potential new planets. This is a debate about not only who can join the club and who controls who joins the club, but also the fear of loosing control of the boundaries. Sounds very much like Christianity me!