I'll never forget when they killed Pluto. I had the news on in the background and they announced that Pluto was no longer a planet. Now, when I was a kid I was one of those little boys who wanted to be an astronaut. (And an oceanographer, a professional baseball player and a teacher. Lord knows what I would have done in my spare time.) I had a poster of the planets on my bedroom wall and was a regular correspondent to the space center just hours away. But when I heard they had taken away Pluto's status a little of my childhood died. I was just relieved they left Uranus alone.
Out this week from Random House/Spiegel & Grau is How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming by Mike Brown. Brown is the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy at the California Institute of Technology. Brown is also the man who discovered Eris, a new planet, in 2005. This discovery began a tumultuous debate which culminated in Pluto being demoted to "dwarf" planet. He then received the most humbling of performance reviews: hate mail from schoolchildren.
Publisher website
In the following video, there is a 20-second audio dropout and the video abruptly ends mid-lecture. It's the best I could find, so sue me.
Pluto is not dead; Mike Brown tried but failed to "kill" it. The IAU demotion was done by only four percent of its members, most of whom are not planetary scientists. It was opposed by hundreds of planetary scientists in a formal petition led by Dr. Alan Stern, Principal Investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission to Pluto. Even Dr. Neil de Grasse Tyson admits the debate is ongoing. I encourage people to learn both sides of the issue. Some good pro-Pluto as a planet books are "Is Pluto A Planet?" by Dr. David Weintraub, "The Case for Pluto" by Alan Boyle, and my own book, hopefully out next year, "The Little Planet that Would Not Die: Pluto's Story." Visit my Pluto Blog at http://laurele.livejournal.com
ReplyDeleteThank you Laurele, I truly appreciate the information.
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