Pluto and Clyde Tombaugh

Is Pluto a Planet?

Have you ever stopped to think about what makes a planet? Or what IS a planet? Or even more so whether something should BE a planet? I studied existentialism when I was a philosophy major in undergrad school and I never thought that I’d be applying definitions of existence to planets and planetoid materials. But the Cosmology class I took my senior year definitely helped me when I watched a recent PBS show on Nova-the Pluto Files.

The show’s host-Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson claims that Pluto is simply not a planet and that it’s not big enough nor does it manage to “clear the neighborhood” of its orbit. I recall a lecture by one of my physics Profs in my first astronomy class-I minored in physics-and the thought at the time was that Pluto was most likely a former moon of the planet Neptune. Pluto was allegedly not very large-look at all the other planets after all! Pluto also was not in the elliptical plane that all the other planets orbited in and wasn’t in a circular orbit but an elliptical orbit that even brought it inside the orbit of Neptune.

Now we can debate the scientific aspects of the definition of whether Pluto is or is not a planet, but I will say that that man who actually discovered Pluto Clyde Tombaugh would probably be rather disappointed today if he were alive. I had the opportunity and pleasure of actually meeting the man. It was a lecture hall at the University of Windsor [Canada] in May of 1989 that he made a guest lecture appearance on a Friday night. Because where else do you expect science geeks to congregate on a Friday night but in a Canadian University!

I can remember several things about his lecture that night. That he spent many, many hours looking at glass slides of the stars looking for that one slide that had a change in it that signified a celestial body crossing the heavens. And that there were some 25,000 plates that he looked at as well as if anyone thought he missed something-like a tenth planet-then we were all welcome to look through those plates again! But he wasn’t planning on doing it!

More men have been to the moon than have discovered a planet. Pluto-planet or not-is a large mass that orbits our sun and was a major find and announcement back when it was discovered in 1930. No one can take away that from Clyde Tombaugh.

PBS-Pluto Files-March 2010
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pluto/

Nasa-Pluto the dwarf planet
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/pluto_worldbook.html

Tuesday, March 09, 2010