by Dan Verrier
Lots of things are going on at the edge of the Solar System these days. To check it out, we’re sending a craft called New Horizons—which is sure to be voted “Lamest Name for a Space Probe” someday—that should arrive in 2015. There have been new objects discovered there in recent years, and though it’s extremely cold that far from the sun, it’s been at the center of one of the most heated debates in astronomy.
Astronomers are an astonishingly nit-picky bunch of bastards. For example, one side says Pluto is a dwarf planet, which is somehow an Entirely Different Thing from a normal planet. The other side wants to expand the criteria of what a normal planet is in order to include it. As of August 24, 2006, Pluto was officially dubbed Not-a-Planet, which has caused huge arguments among nerds, and that means I have been paying close attention. This controversy is entirely unnecessary, and I shall solve it with the following sentence. Pluto is indeed a dwarf planet, but, as indicated by the freaking name, a dwarf planet is also a planet—there are different kinds. In fact, we’ll probably discover that there are a myriad Entirely Different Kinds of planets. Earth is an example of one kind; Pluto is an example of another.
There are at least three more objects in our Solar System that qualify as dwarfs. First is Charon, Pluto’s sidekick; then 2003 UB 313, which is a bit farther back and about twice as big as Pluto. Much nearer to Earth, there’s Ceres, which is in the Asteroid Belt next door to Mars. Of course, this means tossing our nine-planet model of the Solar System out the window, but most astronomers had thrown it out already, because Pluto just didn’t fit in with the rest. Traditionalists and nostalgia-junkies will have to bite it on this one, no matter what, and if the choice is between shoving one out of the group, or letting three more in, then the more the merrier, I say. Let them join in our reindeer games, or some other cliché that indicates an attitude of inclusion.
This, however, brings up the main point of the people who view normal planets and dwarfs as completely different: where do we draw the line? Are we just going to let anything be a planet now? No. I have a feeling that this, in the end, will be a similar story to that of brown dwarf stars, which bridge the gap between large, Jupiter-like planets and small stars. We don’t consider Jupiter a star, do we? Dwarf planets can bridge the gap between asteroids and normal planets, and there will still be a distinction.
Another major qualm with the decision is that of the 10,000 professional astronomers in the world, less than 5% of them were involved in making it. 424, to be precise, so this argument is far from over. But regardless of whether it’s called “planet” or “Tony Robbins’ Left Testicle,” Pluto will continue to be the same distant, methane-frosted rock it’s always been; and surely, if it is named dwarf once and for all, it will be our favorite one. Take that, Warwick Davis … take that.
