Pluto’s status in jeopardy
Planet could be reclassified as a dwarf
By Megan Park, contributing writer
Posted on August 31, 2006

After years of debate between scientists and astronomers over the status of Pluto, a historic turn of events has cast the former planet out into exile.

Many are shaken because of the outcome.

Freshman Andrew Hijjeh is shocked. “It blows my mind,” he said. And freshman Tyler Conta is upset — “That’s crap!”  he said.  “It’s always been a planet. Mickey Mouse can’t name his dog after a piece of space rock.”

Freshman Michael Bowman has only one thing to say.  “I think that all planets regardless of color or size should be treated equally.”

But one JMU professor is getting excited about all the fuss.

Associate professor of geology Erik J. Pyle is excited not so much because of the exclusion of Pluto itself, but because of what it means for science in general.

“The [International Astronomical Union] has come up with a solid definition of a planet,” Pyle said. “Previously they had a working definition that was not to everyone’s satisfaction: must orbit the Sun and have sufficient gravity to pull it into a sphere.” Pyle added that the new criterion added by the IAU is that the planet must have cleared the area of space around it. This is called “ruling its own orbit.” 

“As we had this word planet, it did not adequately describe what we called Pluto, because it was different from the other planets,” Pyle said. “So we needed a new word, and we [now call it] a dwarf planet.”

Currently, not much is known about the surface of Pluto because it’s too far away and small for our Earth telescopes, said Pyle. Pluto is part of what is called the Kuiper Belt, a ring of celestial bodies in the vicinity of Neptune, known as trans-Neptunians.
 
“[Pluto’s] not big enough,” said freshman Jared Taylor. “It’s not massive enough. Because if Pluto’s a planet, then a whole lot of other objects should be planets, too.”  There are at least 70,000 of the bodies with diameters greater than 100 km, according to David Jewitt of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy.

“There is a certain inertia in the content of textbooks,” Pyle said. However, the IAU’s resolution was great for education, because science is about “how things behave rather than what we call them.”
Pyle quoted William Penn to summarize his point of view.

“‘We press their memory too soon and puzzle and strain and load them with rules to know grammar and rhetoric and a strange tongue or two that ten to one may never be useful to them; leaving their natural genius to mechanical or natural knowledge uncultivated which would be of great use to them throughout the whole course of their lives.’