Fight for Pluto !, A Campaign to Reverse the Unjust Demotion Options

[mars loon]

Dear Friends,

Today I am extremely dissapointed that the Pluto Demoters have triumphed.

I respect their opinion, but disagree with it.

I strongly agree with Alan Stern's statement calling it "absurd" that only 424 astronomers were allowed to vote, out of some 10,000 professional astronomers around the globe.

This tiny group is clearly not at all representative by mathematics alone.

I believe we should formulate a plan to overturn this unjust decision and return Pluto to full planetary status, and as the first member of a third catagory of planets, Xena being number two. Thus a total of 10 Planets in our Solar System

Please respond if you agree that Pluto should be restored as a planet.

ken

Ken Kremer
Amateur Astronomers Association of Princeton
Program Chairman

[alan]

A quote from an article by David Jewitt & Jane X. Luu in Dædalus

We have to conclude that Tombaugh discovered Pluto not because of the quality of Lowell’s predictions, but simply because he was looking when nobody else was. These facts, however, did not distract astronomers at Lowell Observatory from advancing Pluto as a planet; and, in the absence of much public discussion until the discovery of the Kuiper Belt, these facts made little impression on the public. For all the wrong reasons, the ‘planet’ label stuck.

It is interesting to speculate on what might have happened had Pluto been properly described as a large kbo upon its discovery in 1930. Most likely, our understanding of the solar system would have been advanced by many decades. The next-brightest kbos after Pluto are fainter by a factor of fifteen or twenty. They would have been difficult for Tombaugh to locate, but astronomical sensitivity increases almost yearly and additional objects could have been identified within a decade or two. Indeed, some of the bright kbos found in recent years were also recorded in photographic observations from the 1950s and 1960s, but they went undetected. One of the main reasons for this is psychological: humans are not very good at perceiving things they do not expect to see. With Pluto entrenched in our minds as the ‘last planet,’ nobody was able to see even the bright kbos until this population had been firmly established in the 1990s.

If Pluto had been immediately recognized as the ‘tip of the Kuiper Belt iceberg,’ we would have known soon after World War II–and certainly before the space age–where comets come from and where to go in the solar system to find our most primitive materials. Our understanding of the dynamics and origin of the solar system would also have been much less biased by observations of the rocky planets and the inner solar system than it has been. The damage done by the mislabeling of Pluto as a planet, in this sense, has been considerable.

http://www.ifa.hawaii.edu/faculty/jewitt/p...s/2007/JL07.pdf