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Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting
Since it was stripped of planetary status, Pluto’s defenders have been fighting the decision – and they’re only getting more passionate
Twenty years ago, Pluto got demoted. After a vote by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in August 2006, Pluto was relegated from major planet to dwarf planet status. Our solar system dropped from nine planets to eight. At the time, many scientists were unhappy with the decision. Two decades on, the debate is, if anything, even more polarised.
“The definition of a planet they created, you can’t use it at all,” says Philip Metzger, the director of the Stephen W Hawking Centre for Microgravity Research and Education at the University of Central Florida. “It makes the definition of a planet completely non-useful in science.”
Metzger is one of a number of scientists and lay people who consider Pluto’s demotion a big mistake.
For some, Pluto’s downgraded status is the source of their affection for the ex-planet. “Pluto represents the underdog that so many people root for, the small kid on the block that is being picked on,” says Kevin Schindler, historian at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona, where Pluto was discovered in 1930.
For others, the IAU’s decision, and the way it was taken, is central to the debate. “My being involved with advocating for Pluto started on the day of the vote,” says writer, actor and amateur astronomer Laurel Kornfeld. “I was like: wait a minute, this is wrong.” When we meet on Zoom she is wearing a T-shirt that says: “Pluto Resistance, 20 years: 2006-2026.”
The campaign to reinstate Pluto – with its passionate advocates, ongoing debates, occasional protests and petitions – seems to be largely confined to the US. “It is more of an issue in the United States,” says Metzger. “This was the one we discovered.” So, the planet’s demotion was a source of wounded pride? “I’ll admit there was some of that – among the public, not the scientists.”
More recently, the campaign has taken on a populist tinge, with Trump’s Nasa administrator, Jared Isaacman, telling a congressional committee in April that he was in favour of a rethink. “I am very much in the camp of Make Pluto a Planet Again,” he said.
The event that sparked the IAU’s 2006 vote was the discovery of a distant celestial body that would come to be called Eris. Eris was out in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Neptune – where Pluto also resides. It was roughly the same size as Pluto (less volume, but more mass). If Pluto was a planet, the argument went, then so was Eris. And if Eris wasn’t a planet, how could Pluto continue to be one?
Eris and Pluto were by no means alone in the Kuiper Belt. Other smaller bodies were discovered around the same time, including Haumea, Makemake and Sedna. Were these also planets? There were likely many more similar objects still to be found. How would schoolchildren manage a planetary roster that might number in the hundreds?