[meteorite-list] PLUTO'S IDENTITY CRISIS

[Sterling K. Webb]

Hi,

    Well, your schools can throw away those brand-new
textbooks you just bought, in which Pluto is called a dwarf
planet. Dwarves are out; Plutoids are in. (Is Walt Disney
getting a cut of the action on this?)

    One smart textbook publisher just leaves the whole thing
out of their books so they don't have change them all the
time. The "new" 2008 science textbooks are mostly the
first to use the "dwarf" moniker, so it's a case of "here's
the new textbook; it's wrong."

    Maybe they should issue the "Astronomy" section of
the science book as a Comic Book every year?

    Meanwhile, here's the URL of another article, interviews
with professional astronomers who explain that "defining" a
planet is a useless waste of time. The title is "Why Planets
Will Never Be Defined."
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/061121_exoplanet_definition.html



Sterling K. Webb
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080619-pluto-confusion.html

Pluto's Identity Crisis Hits
Classrooms and Bookstores
By Jeanna Bryner
SPACE.COM


Pluto was once a planet. Then, a dwarf planet.
And as of last week, a plutoid. The fall from
grace has teachers, parents and educational
publishers struggling to keep up, while kids
remain loyal to their favorite, the ninth planet.
Underscore planet.

Last week, the International Astronomical Union
(IAU) announced Pluto should now be called a "plutoid,"
two years after the organization voted to demote
Pluto to "dwarf planet" status.

Meanwhile, many kids are nearly certain Pluto is
still a planet.

"I think it's a planet. But me and my friends, we
talk about it sometimes and we go back and forth,"
said Natalie Browning, 9, sitting in a park in
Manhattan with her family. "Right now, I'm not
100 percent. I'm just 75 percent" sure that Pluto
is a planet.

Natalie's mom, Bobbie Browning, said, "You've got
kids with textbooks saying that Pluto is part of
the solar system and a planet, and teachers have
to say it isn't [a planet]."

Science teachers and publishers already worked to
update their resources to read "dwarf planet." And
now, boom, that category is out of favor among
astronomers.

"Students who have just learned about the concept
of dwarf planets must now be taught the new concept
of plutoid," said Janis Milman, who teaches earth
science at Thomas Stone High School in Maryland.
"This will lead to confusion in the classroom and
resistance to learning the new terms, because the
students will question, why learn something that
might change again in a year or so?"

A cursory survey at a large chain bookstore here
revealed three out of four books published in 2006
or later were updated, with Pluto designated as a
dwarf planet and the solar system said to include
just eight planets.

Chronicles of Pluto

Discovered in 1930 by Clyde W. Tombaugh at Lowell
Observatory in Arizona, Pluto was always considered
an oddball of sorts, with its tiny size (smaller than
some moons) and eccentric orbit.  During its 248-year
trek around the sun, Pluto swings from its farthest
point from the sun at 49.5 astronomical units (AU) to
as close as 29 AU from the sun. One AU is the average
distance between the Earth and sun, or about 93 million
miles (150 million kilometers).

More than 70 years later, in August 2006, 424 astronomers
at an IAU meeting voted to demote Pluto to dwarf planet
status. Last week, the IAU Executive Committee reclassified
Pluto as a plutoid. The other object in the plutoid club,
Eris, is larger and more massive than Pluto.

Astronomers expect to find hundreds of Pluto-sized objects.
And so the fate of Pluto will determine how these worlds
are classified. For instance, new computer modeling suggests
an object up to 70 percent of Earth's mass is lurking beyond
Pluto. This "Planet X," if confirmed, would be called a
plutoid under the IAU's scheme.

No matter what the scientists say, many kids won't let go.

"It's a planet," said fifth-grader Emily Mitchell, whose
mother Laurie agreed, saying, "I grew up learning it was
a planet."

"It's the smallest planet," said Liam, a 4-year-old who
is "about to be 5." Liam's teacher Rachel Kaplan said,
"I was really sad when Pluto was declassified as a planet,
because I've studied astrology for a number of years."

Aileen Wilson said her 7-year-old son is interested in
Pluto's label. "He's interested in why it was a planet
and why it's not a planet anymore."

"I know that it was demoted and it's not a planet. But
I don't know what it's called," said Erin Kelly, a
pre-school teacher sitting on a park bench with her
students in New York.

In the classroom

Even as scientists are arguing over the "plutoid"
designation, with some saying they won't use the term,
educators are already latching onto it.

Change is the name of the game in science, according to
Gerry Wheeler, the executive director of the National
Science Teachers Association.

"Basically, it's a teachable moment for science teachers,
because it shows the dynamic nature of science," Wheeler
told SPACE.com. He added the NSTA will spread news of the
plutoid category to science teachers in the fall.

Elementary school science teacher Lucy Jensen agrees:
"Pluto has made it interesting studying our planets
this year." She teaches at Joliet Public School in Montana.
"Our only problem we now have is buying new material,
such as posters, videos, DVDs and game/study materials
that need to be updated," she said.

Jensen added that while her fourth-grade students were
more upset than the third graders about Pluto's demotion,
the parents were the most upset. "It is hard to teach
old dogs new tricks, and we like what we know," she said.

"Time has always been taken in the classroom to ponder
the origin of Pluto. When Pluto became a dwarf planet,
along with Eris and Ceres, it made it easier to explain
why an object of Pluto's small stature could be classified,"
high-school teacher Milman said. "Now we will just need
to teach them more new definitions."

Milman added that "dwarf planets" is an easier term
for students to grasp compared with plutoids. "Objects
of Pluto, Eris and Ceres' size are too small to be called
planets so they were called dwarf planets. That was
easier for the students to understand," she said.

Yet many students are still unaware of the change made
in 2006.

"My fourth graders still consider Pluto a planet," said
Bev Grueber, a science teacher at North Bend Elementary
in Nebraska. "We do extensive oral reports on the planets
to meet a state standard, and everyone jumps for joy
when they get Pluto. Last year, I left Pluto out of the
draw and they asked where it was, so they still consider
it a planet regardless of what the space scientists tell
us the definition of that planet is."

Aram Friedman, who founded Ansible Technologies Ltd. in
New Jersey, travels to schools to teach about astronomy
using a portable planetarium. In a typical fifth-grade
class, he teaches students the features of the inner
planets and the outer planets. Pluto, he says, doesn't
fit into those categories. That makes sense to kids.

Publishing lag

Many science textbooks have only recently caught up with
the dwarf planet concept.

For publisher McGraw Hill Education, the 2008 elementary
and secondary school science textbooks describe Pluto as
a dwarf planet.

Middle schools with the current Holt Science and Technology
textbooks would see Pluto defined as a dwarf planet.
McDougal Littell Science took a slightly different approach.

"We didn't say how many planets there were, so we didn't
have to make a lot of changes. We explained, historically,
that it had been classified as a planet when it was discovered,"
said Dan Rogers, vice president and director of Holt McDougal's
science and health product development.

McDougal's teacher's edition included a detailed explanation
of Pluto's dwarf planet status.

"One of the reasons we were cautious is because we thought
the whole thing was unresolved and was going to change again,"
Rogers said. "We're in the process of developing a brand new
program, a new set of books."

In "Traveler's Guide to the Solar System," an astronomy
book published in 2007 for kids age 8 to 10, the author
notes, "Earth is the third of nine planets (some say
eight, some say ten, but nine is kind of traditional),
orbiting our local star, the Sun."

Starry Night, astronomy software that includes educational
resources, refers to Pluto as a dwarf planet, according
to content director Pedro Braganca. (Starry Night is a
division of Imaginova Corp., which also owns SPACE.com.)

And soon, educational publishers may need to re-update
material. Word has it astronomers are vowing to pursue
a reinstatement of Pluto as a planet.