A vote for Plutos reinstatement as a planet

NASA s Hubble Space Telescope shows Pluto and three of its moons in 2006. (AP Photo/NASA File)

There were once nine planets. Everyone learned them sometimes aided by a mnemonic My Very Excellent Mother Just Sent Us Nine Pizzas.

But back in 2006 the International Astronomical Union (IAU) arbiter of what is and what isn t a planet stripped Pluto of its status saying it was too small to pack sufficient gravitational punch. It was downgraded to a new second class status dwarf planet.

So then there were eight Mercury Venus Earth Mars Jupiter Saturn Uranus and Neptune or My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos.

The decision did not sit well with the public. Some amateur stargazers and some astronomers thought it rather arbitrary. As the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics put it in a press release a dwarf fruit tree is still a small fruit tree and a dwarf hamster is still a small hamster.

But recently the Harvard Smithsonian Center did something about it It held a debate pro and con and let the audience vote. The result Pluto IS a planet.

The debate centered around the IAU s demands of a planet that it must

be in orbit around the Sun be round or nearly round and be shown to have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit be gravitationally dominant in its area the big kid on the block.

Pluto was originally kicked out because it did not clear the neighborhood. It is indeed small. It has a radius of about 750 miles less than 20 percent of the Earth s radius. Its circumference is about 4 500 miles which makes it smaller than the moon. You could fly around its equator faster than flying from Washington D.C. to Hawaii.

According to a release from the center Owen Gingerich who chaired the IAU planet definition committee presented the historical viewpoint. He said Pluto is a planet and a planet is a culturally defined word that changes over time. Gareth Williams associate director of the Minor Planet Center presented the IAU s viewpoint that Pluto is not a planet. And Dimitar Sasselov director of the Harvard Origins of Life Initiative presented the exoplanet scientist s viewpoint.

Sasselov argued among other things that the criteria for planethood was sun centric excluding planets beyond our solar system or so called exoplanets. He offered an alternative definition A planet he argued is the smallest spherical lump of matter that formed around stars or stellar remnants. That opened up a lot of possibilities one of them clearly being the reinstatement of Pluto.

When the unrecorded voice vote was taken Sasselov s new definition prevailed.

Of course the vote doesn t bind anyone. But for Pluto enthusiasts it s a start.

Los Angeles based Web programmer Chris Spurgeon s bumpersticker seen in 2006. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

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