They have to cut five minutes out of Gustav Holst now.
We lost a planet from our solar system this week and it couldn’t get Jon Benet Ramsey off the front page. Talk about lack of respect for a celestial body! I grew up being told that there were nine planets in the solar system. It wasn’t as big a deal as knowing all fifty states and their capitals, but it was very high on any educator’s list of basic facts that most students should know back then. If you could name the planets in order from Mercury, which was closest to the sun, out to Pluto, you were really doing well. If you could name all the moons, of which Pluto has three so far, you were into serious geekhood.
Pluto, which was “discovered” in 1930, was so much a part of our culture that Mickey Mouse (a creation of the '30s himself) had a dog named for the ninth planet. I never did figure out why Goofy, also a dog, happened to be Mickey’s pal and knew how to talk , but Mickey kept Pluto as a pet. I guess that might have been the first hint that the outermost outer planet might not be long for our world.
No, Osama did not build a suitcase bomb and blow up the smallest planet into asteroids. Back in the 1800s, Ceres, the largest asteroid in the belt between Mars and Jupiter had status as a planet, too. Ceres, which is even smaller than Pluto had the misfortune of being the largest object among thousands circling the sun. Not long after its discovery, Ceres got demoted to asteroid status for about a hundred and fifty years until some astronomers decided to try to bring it up to the majors again in 2001 along with a big icy object with the unromantic label UB 313. Instead of promoting Ceres, the association tightened their definition of planet and wound up creating this whole bogus category — “the dwarf planet”.
Basically Ceres got brought up out of the asteroid league and poor Pluto got sent down in the process to join Ceres and UB 313 as part of the dwarf division. To add insult to injury, Pluto’s largest moon, Chiron, which is almost as big as Pluto itself (with two objects, how the heck do you tell which is orbiting which?) also got bumped into dwarfdom.
Article comments
1 - Victor Plenty
Since this is satire I won't get too picky about proofreading every detail, but there is one old grudge of mine you've touched upon, an error I can't leave unchallenged.
For years now it's grated on me whenever people talked about using the orbit of Pluto as the boundary of our solar system. Even before we had telescopes that could see them, we've known there were vast numbers of objects far out beyond Pluto, many of them likely to contain precious resources such as water and metals. It makes no sense to draw our boundary line at the orbit of the outermost major planet, whether we consider that line to be Pluto's orbit or Neptune's.
All the objects orbiting our Sun should be considered part of our solar system. The resources they can provide may be crucial to our future as a spacefaring species. Even if that future seems distant now, we can still prepare the foundations of our cultural claim to the resources in the Kuiper belt and the Oort Cloud.
Okay, I've made my point now, so I won't rant any longer about this.
2 - chancelucky
Victor,
feel free to get picky. I'm fine with your point and it makes perfect sense to me. I assume the real outer boundary of the solar system is just whatevere the outermost object that happens to orbit the sun turns out to be. I just couldn't resist the joke based on the lay notion of where the solar system begins and ends.
I suppose though if they can recategorize Pluto and Ceres, they can also might choose to redefine the boundaries of the solar system.
In the meantime, feel free to let me know about corrections. I'm not an astronomer nor do I play one on blog critics.
3 - Victor Plenty
I'm not sure the outer boundary of the solar system is best defined by any object's orbit, Chancelucky. Certainly any object orbiting the sun should be inside whatever boundary we end up defining, but the actual objects at that distance are distributed too randomly and have orbits too eccentric for them to serve as boundary markers.
Some limit based on the sun's gravity well might be better. The region we mark out that way would be the region where any object could orbit the sun, even if none are actually in such orbits at any given moment.
As for your invitation to get picky about the details of your article, I'll just point out two things for now. First, Pluto's largest moon Charon is not currently being promoted to any special status. Early drafts of the resolution mentioned that idea, but it was taken out of the final resolution actually passed by the International Astronomical Union.
Second, Gustav Holst finished composing The Planets in 1916 and it was first performed in 1920. As you mentioned, Pluto was not discovered until 1930, so Holst's composition never contained any movement named after Pluto.
I'm not an astronomer either, but I've always been interested in space exploration and always been fascinated by many of its details. That's why certain facts tend to stand out when I read commentary articles on the subject.
4 - chancelucky
Victor,
thanks for the clarification. Yes, the Holst was just a joke since he clearly didn't include Pluto as a planet in the suite. Also I did fudge a little on Charon's getting "promoted", for the sake of the joke. I did know that it had been discussed.
I guess you're the one to ask. At some point, the sun's gravity becomes pretty minimal, but I would assume the ability of a body to stay in orbit is something of a function of speed, distance,the mass of the object, and the eccentricity of the orbit. I'm pushing the level of my physics, but an object in a stable orbit moving very fast can maintain "orbit" buch better than one moving more slowly.
I would assume that someone could calculate that.
Actually, for me, the really interesting object in the recent congress was UB 313.
5 - Victor Plenty
Using the sun's gravity well to define the boundaries of the solar system might not be best option, either. It's just one suggestion, and one that would take quite a bit more work to fully define.
Another possibility would be the heliopause, where the solar wind gives way to the more diffuse gaseous particles of the interstellar medium. Wikipedia has some good illustrations of how big this region might be.
The heliopause is about 76 times more distant from the Sun than our Earth's orbit. This boundary would include most of the Kuiper belt objects, so I like it much better than using Neptune's orbit. However, it would leave out much of the region called the "scattered disk," including the region where UB 313 ("Xena") spends a good deal of its time. The heliopause boundary also leaves out all of the Oort cloud, so I don't really like it enough to fully support it. That's why I suggested the solar gravity well instead.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean about the relationship between moving fast and the stability of an orbit, so I won't try to respond to that just yet.
6 - Scott Butki
Good piece.
I didn't read this until now but I see we both used Rodney Dangerfield references in our pieces on Pluto.
7 - chancelucky
Thanks Scott....
I enjoyed your Pluto post as well. Does this make us like the Newton and Leibniz of solar system comedy?
8 - Scott Butki
I think we're like the two guys who got the Nobel prize for DNA.
Or Martin and Lewis.
One of them duos.