[meteorite-list] Pluto : from nyt ed. page

[Gerald Flaherty]

Loved every subtle sylable. Thanks for passig it along. Kinda sums it up 
quite admiribly, Susan, I think.
Jerry Flaherty
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "batkol" <batkol at sbcglobal.net>
To: <meteorite-list at meteoritecentral.com>
Sent: Wednesday, August 23, 2006 8:19 AM
Subject: [meteorite-list] Pluto : from nyt ed. page


> found this in the times.  enjoy.  take care
> susan
> I ? Pluto
> By TIM KREIDER
> Charlestown, Md.
>
> MY love for our picked-on ninth planet is deeply, perhaps embarrassingly, 
> personal.
>
> I took my first public stand on Pluto's taxonomical fate when I addressed 
> the Forum on Outer Planetary Exploration in 2001 (don't ask why a 
> cartoonist was addressing astronomers - it's a long story).
>
> I informed the assembled scientists that, first of all, no way was I or 
> anyone else about to un-memorize anything we'd already been forced to 
> learn in elementary school. More important, I felt sure that, as former 
> children, we all instinctively respected the principle: no do-overs.
>
> Planets, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, and you 
> can't blithely oust them no matter how eccentric, skewed or unqualified 
> they may prove to be. If they could kick out Pluto, I warned, they could 
> do it to anything, or anyone.
>
> I admit: it's a highly emotional issue and maybe I got carried away in the 
> heat of debate.
>
> Even I was a little abashed last week when the International Astronomical 
> Union tried to protect Pluto's status by proposing an absurdly broad 
> definition of planethood that encompasses moons, asteroids and 
> trans-Neptunian objects - in other words, pretty much any half-formed hunk 
> of frozen crud that can pull itself together into a ball long enough to 
> get photographed by the Hubble.
>
> For longtime Pluto partisans, there was something almost punitive about 
> this proposal: happy now?
>
> I guess I always knew, in my heart, that Pluto didn't "belong." Pluto is 
> idiosyncratic - neither a dull, domestic terrestrial planet nor a surly, 
> vainglorious gas giant. It's mostly ice. It's smaller than our own Moon, 
> and has an orbit so eccentric that it spends 20 years of its 248-year 
> revolutionary period inside Neptune's orbit. It's tilted at a crazy 
> 17-degree angle to the ecliptic, and its satellite, Charon, is so 
> disproportionately large that it's been called a double planet.
>
> Pluto is what my old astronomy textbook rather judgmentally called a 
> "deviant," and I've always felt a little defensive on its behalf.
>
> I've long regarded Saturn's misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming 
> Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along 
> with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the 
> chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked 
> to anybody. Still, I just can't stand by and watch as the solar system's 
> Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social 
> ostracism.
>
> All I really wanted was a little velvet-rope treatment for Pluto. I didn't 
> expect them to throw open the doors to all this Kuiper Belt riffraff.
>
> It's like that point when your party's grown out of control and you look 
> around and ask: Who are these people? Sedna? Xena? Ceres? Ceres is an 
> asteroid, for God's sake. Why not just make 1997 XF11 or Greenland or 
> Harriet Meiers a planet?
>
> And I am second to no one in my respect for Charon, but come on: it's 
> obviously Pluto's moon.
>
> Now they're proposing to designate it a "large companion," which sounds 
> like the sort of euphemistic legal status the court might grant to Oliver 
> Hardy and can't be doing Charon's self-esteem one bit of good. "Longtime 
> companion" would have been more dignified and validating.
>
> The solar system is a mess.
>
> The situation this seems most similar to is the inextricably tangled 
> social nightmare that is inviting people to your wedding. You truly want 
> to invite your distant and eccentric but dear old friend Pluto, but this 
> necessarily means inviting his horrible girlfriend, too, plus then maybe 
> you're obliged to invite all the other people you were both friends with 
> in college, friends he's still in contact with who will be offended if 
> he's invited and they're not but who, frankly, are now boring people with 
> whom you no longer have anything in common.
>
> Some would suggest we just have to be harsh about this and not invite any 
> of them, Pluto included. But these people are forgetting that we already 
> sent Pluto an invitation, 76 years ago. Pluto has rented a tuxedo.
>
> The astronomical union is to vote on Pluto tomorrow. But even as 
> astronomers squabble, I remain confident that this whole wonky state of 
> affairs will not be permanent. Eventually we'll get it all sorted out.
>
> For the record, I would accept a separate (but equal!) class of dwarves or 
> planetoids, including Sedna and Xena. After all, the childhood mnemonic is 
> easily amended: My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, Sans 
> Xenophobia.
>
> But what I really wish is that we'd just grandfather Pluto in and then 
> close all the loopholes. Let's do it, not for scientific reasons, but for 
> sentimental ones.
>
> As a friend of mine at NASA said, "It would prove our humanity to let 
> Pluto stay in." It would be like that moment when the doorman is about to 
> escort you out of a private party where you don't, arguably, belong, but 
> then someone who knows you taps him on the shoulder and says, "Wait a 
> minute, I know this guy. He's O.K.."
>
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