"Demotion" of Pluto

Last year, when the World Astronomical Society reclassified Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet", I could finally say "I have now personally observed all the planets in my home-made telescope." At this point, I doubt that I'll ever see Pluto in my own telescope, an 8" light-bucket, which is housed in a quarter-inch plywood box and includes storebought pre-ground lenses. Before I undertook that project, which seems eons ago, I had made, from scratch, more or less, a 4" reflector and ground my own lenses. I ruined a lot of glass before I finally got it right. Buying professionally-made lenses is really less expensive in the long run, at least for a grinder like me.

For reasons which escape me, the general public seemed to be disappointed, upset or downright irate at the "demotion" of Pluto from full planet status. It was if the citizens of the world had a vested interest in the number of "planets" in the solar system and were having some of their investment purloined from them.

At age five, I had a keen interest in the skies, astronomy, space travel and the like. I believed that I would be the first man on the moon. Then one October morning, a month short of my eleventh birthday, I awoke to read in the morning Journal that Sputnik had been launched. For days, I had a sick, empty feeling, knowing that I would be too young to be chosen as the astronaut (we didn't have any at the time) to first step foot on the moon.

Before I was ten years old, I had classified the solar system objects into categories with one star, four large gas planets, four rocky inner planets, a belt of asteroids between Jupiter and Mars (at the precise location where another planet should have been and probably once was), some comets, and a bunch of moons. Having read all available information on the subject, I considered Pluto to likely be a runaway moon of Neptune. I certainly did not consider Pluto a planet, although it was classified as one.

Pluto did not have a nearly circular orbit like the eight planets. It was so elliptical that some of the time it was the 8th planet from the sun and some of the time it was the 9th planet from the sun. The fact that it crossed the area of the orbit of Neptune made me believe that it was a runaway moon, or at least something other than a planet. Its orientation in the solar system was outside the ecliptic which contained the eight planets, being tilted more than 20% outside the plane of the other planets. No one seemed to know exactly how big it was, and estimates ranged anywhere from the size of Earth to the size of Earth's moon.

When I learned about the solar system, there were 26 known moons, distributed thusly:

Earth - 1
Mars - 2
Jupiter - 12
Saturn - 9
Uranus - 2

Our scopes just weren't powerful enough to see more.

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When the Russian/American astronomer/writer Isaac Asimov referred to Pluto as a "mesoplanet", or an intermediate planet, I liked the term. He never thought it was a planet, and neither did I, so I had nothing to lose when Pluto was demoted or downgraded to dwarf planet status. To me, it was a simple case of a proper reclassification of a solar system member. Asimov called a "mesoplanet" any solar system body smaller than Mercury but larger than Ceres, the largest asteroid in the inner belt. At the time, Pluto was the only member of the class. Now, we have three certified dwarf planets and 39 more objects which may qualify.

There are currently 17 objects in the Solar System larger than Pluto, including the Sun, eight planets, seven moons, and the dwarf planet Eris. There are a dozen more solar system members smaller than Pluto but larger than Ceres, including nine moons and three objects which are likely to be classified as dwarf planets.

How many more there are out there, only time, and technology, can tell.

But don't mourn for Pluto. Pluto hasn't changed, just humanity's understanding of its rightful place among the members of our system. Pluto's personality is so icy, I doubt that its feelings were hurt.