Pluto's legacy lives on as 82nd anniversary approaches

Raise your hand if you agree with this statement: Pluto is a planet.

Aside from looking a little foolish for raising your hand in whatever public location you are currently situated in, you are probably wrong according to the organization, a.k.a. the people who decided that Pluto is not a planet.

Chances are that you are probably complacent about Pluto's downgrade from regular planet to dwarf planet, as was I, until I realized that Feb. 18th marks the 82nd anniversary of Pluto's discovery by Clyde Tombaugh. No, I do not believe you will find an outdoor event celebrating Pluto's discovery in this page's calendar simply because February, just like the surface of Pluto, is usually quite cold in Baltimore.

Okay so that is a slight exaggeration, since it's been unseasonably "warm" the past two weeks, with temperatures in the 30s to 50s. Coincidentally, Pluto usually has a similar range, except in Kelvin. Can't do the conversion? Please consult a science or engineering major.

If your memory is already failing you, then let's recap why Pluto had, at what seemed like a random occurrence, been re-classified as a dwarf planet after we spent much of our childhood ending that fun little acronym with "pizza."

In 2006, the International Astronomy Union (IAU) had to confront the larger issue of what a planet actually was after the discovery of Eris the year before. Consensus could not be reached on whether Eris was the tenth planet in the solar system, although it was roughly the same size as Pluto. Just reflect on that for a moment. Would you be more troubled to have a new planet beyond "pizza" or to not care about Pluto?

As it turns out though, size is not the direct determinant of whether an object in our solar system is a planet. In the resolution that the IAU adopted, they decided that a ‘planet' in our solar system must orbit the Sun (for obvious reasons), it has to be big enough to take on a spherical shape by the force of its own gravity and it "must have cleared the neighborhood around its orbit." That third one can be tricky to explain, but I will tell you right now that Pluto failed it.

Why exactly? Well, to "clear the neighborhood" means to have a size that's larger than the object orbiting it, such as the moons around a planet. Pluto's size relative to its moons is much smaller than the rest of the planets in the solar system by several orders of magnitude, casting it into the bin of dwarf planets you probably have never heard of unless you did a little extra studying for an astronomy unit. Even among the scientific community, this decision did not go over very well.

While I personally did not observe the protests that much, I do recall a segment that Stephen Colbert had done where he redid the acronym as "My Very Educated Mother Just Said Uh-oh No Pluto." Only one of my friends in high school felt strongly about Pluto, so much so that she spent our last calculus class drawing a visual display arguing for Pluto's right to be a planet.

I should backtrack one year, though, to a 2008 gathering at the Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory of researchers who have taken both sides of the IAU's decision. Dubbed "The Great Planet Debate," a press release published after the conference stated that the researchers were not able to reach a consensus.

Even two years afterward, members of the scientific community still cannot fully come to terms with the IAU's decision.

Without Pluto's prominence as a planet, where does it leave the many characters like Sailor Pluto (please note that I have never watched or read Sailor Moon) or Pluto the Dog? Has the Greek god of the Underworld been undermined in his greatness now that he is only named after a dwarf planet? No matter what your particular sets of interests are, Pluto's status inevitably relates back to your experiences.

Still, losing Pluto as our ninth planet does not seem like a major loss to me.

From my perspective, it's weird that the last planet in our solar system is solid, while the rest of the planets beyond our solar system are gas giants.

Yes, I do agree that losing Pluto as a planet is a loss to what we have known since childhood, but, for the sake of having a system that makes sense, I am quietly observing the 82nd anniversary of my favorite dwarf planet's discovery this weekend.