Extraterrestrial

[AKvetch]

Astronomers will convene this month to consider dropping Pluto from planets’ ranks.

By MATT STEARNS
The Star’s Washington correspondent
Posted on Sun, Aug. 13, 2006

WASHINGTON | In articles about his life, they always called Clyde Tombaugh “a Kansas farm boy,” as if to draw sharp contrast with the cosmic magnitude of his signature achievement.

Discovering a planet, after all, is a rare distinction. There are, most schoolchildren will tell you, only nine in our solar system.

But soon, there could be eight: Pluto, that Kansas farm boy’s best-known scientific contribution, faces demotion.

At a conference in Prague, Czech Republic, later this month, the International Astronomical Union, which oversees such matters, is scheduled to consider a resolution that defines a planet.

Driven largely by controversy over the status of Pluto, which doesn’t share several key attributes of the solar system’s eight other planets, the resolution could mean Pluto’s dismissal from that select group.

Instead, it could become one of thousands of small, icy objects in the decidedly less glamorous Kuiper Belt, just beyond Neptune.

The alternative being considered by the astronomers is to maintain Pluto’s planetary credentials — but that would potentially open the door to dozens more planets. Some objects in the Kuiper Belt are bigger than Pluto.

“This is such a hot issue,” said Steve Maran, author of Astronomy for Dummies. “They (usually) never rule on things like this. … There’s a lot more to it than science.”

The committee writing the resolution has worked in secret. Few people know what it will recommend. Those who know aren’t talking, even to longtime colleagues in the small world of big-time astronomy. Egos are involved. Some say U.S. jingoism has raised its head (Pluto is the only one of the nine planets discovered by an American). And there’s no guarantee that the conference will accept the resolution, whatever it is.

From a purely scientific perspective, downgrading Pluto is no big deal, said Daniel Green of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.

“All through history, we’ve changed the number of planets,” Green said. “There used to be only seven planets. People thought the sun and the moon were planets and the Earth wasn’t. Things change.”

Tombaugh’s tale

The last time things changed this much was Feb. 18, 1930.

That’s the day Tombaugh, working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., discovered Pluto by examining hundreds of thousands of tiny stars on photos of the sky taken with a powerful telescope on consecutive nights.

He was 24 at the time, no college education, low man on the totem pole at the observatory. The heavens had obsessed him for most of his life. He even made his own high-powered telescopes at the family farm north of the western Kansas town of Burdett, grinding glass for them in a root cellar that provided perfect temperatures for such delicate work.

“Many a time I have got up, long after midnight and there he would be, out with his telescope, even after a long hard day’s work plowing or in harvest,” Tombaugh’s mother told The Kansas City Star after her son’s discovery. “I would call to him to come in and go to bed. … But he’d be out there till daylight came and the stars faded out.”

Tombaugh used his homemade telescopes to map planetary movements and sent his best work to Lowell Observatory, whose search for a new planet fired his imagination. A job offer followed, and Tombaugh stayed on the farm just long enough to earn money to buy a one-way train ticket to Flagstaff.

“There are 15 million stars in the sky as bright or brighter than Pluto, 15 million,” Tombaugh told National Public Radio in 1995, two years before his death at age 90. “I had to pick one image out of the 15 million. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack, and that’s what most people aren’t willing to do; it’s brutal.

“But I knew that if I didn’t do this job they’d send me back home. And this is much better than pitching hay.”

The discovery made Tombaugh a celebrity and won him a scholarship to the University of Kansas. He worked summers on the family farm while studying astronomy, then spent decades gazing at the stars, teaching his passion, and making a series of important, if less celebrated, scientific contributions.

“Tombaugh discovered Pluto. That made him famous,” said Reta Beebe, an astronomy professor at New Mexico State University, where Tombaugh did much of his work. “The science he did was the search for others, the huge grunt work that he did.”

The controversy

Virtually since its discovery, questions have dogged Pluto. It just wasn’t like the other planets: Too small. Erratic orbit. Not enough of a rocky center.

Generations of schoolchildren labored to memorize the names of nine planets. Yet many scholars questioned Pluto’s inclusion in the Big Nine; “a propaganda effort by the Lowell Observatory,” Green said.

In 2000, the Hayden Planetarium in New York City opened a new solar system exhibit. Conspicuously missing among the planets: Pluto. An argument that had engulfed scientific circles exploded into public view.

“My files are overfilled with hate mail from elementary students,” said Neil deGrasse Tyson, the planetarium’s director, who called Pluto “a vagabond of the solar system.”

The arguments for keeping Pluto as a planet: It is a large, round object that orbits the sun. It has an atmosphere. It has moons.

“It just fits into the bag of being a planet better,” said Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Arizona. “We know enough to know it’s not just an inert ball of ice.”

Then there’s the cultural argument: After 76 years, people are used to it.

“I’ve never heard of anyone who’s not a scientist who thinks Pluto is not a planet,” Maran said. “It comes down to who owns Pluto?”

Certainly, the schoolchildren of America feel a kinship to the tiny, distant planet that shares a name with a much-loved Disney character.

“If you give an assignment to pick a planet, there’s always a fight over Pluto,” said Brenda Beecher, a former science teacher in Burdett, where a marker along Kansas 156 outside town commemorates Tombaugh’s achievement.

In Burdett, population about 250, they use the Tombaugh connection even today to teach youngsters to dream big, that “they can do something worldwide if they want,” Beecher said.

Pint-size lobbyists are working the highest levels, but science and sentiment are rare bedfellows.

“My niece said to me, ‘Are you going to demote Pluto?’ ” said Robert Williams, a vice president of the International Astronomical Union who is deeply involved in the deliberations on Pluto. “If that’s the way it is, that’s what we do. It’s not written in stone anywhere there’s got to be a numerable number of planets. If it upsets schoolchildren, I regret that.”

And what of the legacy of Tombaugh, whose life story reads like Frank Capra and Horatio Alger conspired to concoct the most sepia-toned of unlikely tales?

Annette Tombaugh-Sitze, his daughter, said Tombaugh always was bothered by questions about Pluto’s status. But she’s sure he’s having the last laugh: His ashes are aboard a research spaceship hurtling toward Pluto, his majestic discovery. Whatever it is.

“Dad’s on a great adventure,” she said.


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