I most certainly agree with your last sentence. Pluto will outlast us all. That’s part of the fascination many of us have with these celestial objects. Their endurance long beyond any of our lives cannot help but evoke a sense of immortality and transcendence.

Laurel: I have to admit that I’m curious, why are you so invested in this? Is this simply a “just cause to be championed” or do you have some direct personal tie with planetary science and/or Pluto? You seem to be taking this whole debate rather personally, while I admit to finding the whole “debate” rather silly. More of a media darling public interest story than a real scientific issue.

Again, thanks for the discussion. We will see if the court of public opinion wins out or if the few succeed in their “rampage” against Pluto. In the end, after humans and our naming conventions are long extinct, the rock we call Pluto will still be wobbling around the star we call “The Sun” (assuming we don’t discover it’s made of sweet crude and mine it out existence).

In the end, you, I, and the general public may actually be the ones to determine what the term planet means. Many scientists, educators, and members of the public have simply ignored the IAU definition. Witness the new National Geographic book titled “Eleven Planets” that includes the eight classical planets and the three dwarf planets all under the umbrella of planets. If enough people ignore the IAU definition over a long enough period of time, it will likely become irrelevant. Even the IAU acknowledges that public usage could very well render its definition meaningless.

In the end we seem to agree that this ‘debate’ is about hurt feelings and reputations and NOT ABOUT SCIENCE.

I think that was my point from the beginning.

As new scientific discoveries are made, new fields of study develop that previously did not exist. Astronomy is now a very broad subject, and there is good reason to argue that planetary science has become its own specialty. This is very different from your example of quartz scientists deciding to break away from geology and create their own field based on one type of crystal. It is more akin to oceanography splitting off from geology and meteorology because the new area contains its own characteristics, properties, life forms, etc., enough to make it an entirely separate discipline. This is what is happening in astronomy now. People who study galaxies, black holes, stars of various types, cosmology, etc. do not deal with planets; their research is very specific to their areas of study.

The distinction between planetary science and general astronomy is not arbitrary. As to whether the rest of the scientific community will listen to a group of planetary scientists, the answer likely depends on individual scientists. We may well have a time when there isn’t one consensus on this issue. That is okay because we are learning so much so rapidly that much of what we know is in a state of flux and is likely to be subject to multiple reclassifications. For example, what happens if we find microbial life on Europa or Titan? How does that life get classified and by whom–biologists? Astronomers? Planetary scientists?

I believe that the process by which a body such as the IAU votes is very much a concern here. The fact that the IAU used a flawed process that ignored its own bylaws as well as the recommendations of its own subcommittee, that it made no provisions for absentee voting on such a public matter, show it to be insular, out of touch, and incompetent in creating an inclusive decision making process. In the US electoral system, we can all make our voices heard within the system. However, people who are not members of the IAU, even if their specialty is planetary science, have no means of having input into its decision-making process. The IAU is very selective in whom it admits to membership. Ironically, Clyde Tombaugh, discoverer of Pluto, would not have been eligible because he did not have a PhD, yet he was clearly one of the best astronomers of his day. Also, the IAU leadership has been very contemtuous of public reaction to its decision. They may think public sentiment does not matter, but if so, they are forgetting who funds astronomy in most countries–the taxpayers. If they keep up the condescending attitude toward public opinion, IAU members just might find their projects de-funded by governments elected by an angry public.

If you want anyone to keep politics and turf wars out of science, you should be addressing the 424 IAU members who voted in Prague. Several French astronomers openly threatened that “Pluto is going down because we don’t like American policy in the Middle East.” Anti-American sentiment loomed large in the vote because Pluto was discovered by an American and is viewed by many as an “American planet.”

A great deal of the General Assembly in Prague was a political battle between dynamicists, who define objects by where they are versus planetary scientists, who define objects by what they are. The dynamicists staged a “revolt” in the latter days of the conference, when everyone else had already left, with the specific goal of imposing their definition on the entire group. In fact, one of the leaders of this “revolt” was quoted as saying that if dwarf planets are counted as planets, his life’s work would be ruined! One could make a case that much of what happened in Prague was due to “turf wars,” which is just another reason why that vote should be overturned.

I don’t believe anyone would be out of a job based on his or her position on Pluto. And even scientists who supported the original demotion admit the IAU definition is sloppy and have almost nothing positive to say about the “plutoid” classification. There are also funding implications here. New Horizons likely would not have been funded if Pluto had been considered an asteroid. In practice, demoting Pluto consigns it to a secondary category that will be viewed as far less important and significant and therefore less likely to be studied.

Why all the attacks on planetary scientists as the ones having vested interests? One could reasonably argue this is true across the board. However, planetary scientists are interested in very specific types of objects–those in hydrostatic equilibrium and those rocky bodies that are not, namely the asteroids. They are not looking to tell astronomers who study quasars or pulsars how to define those phenomena and simply want the same courtesy in return. Shouldn’t those who spend their life studying planets be the ones to define what a planet is? And shouldn’t any group making decisions with worldwide implications be using a far more open process than the IAU is currently using?

So yes, the so called ‘planetary scientists’ can defy the arbitrary distinctions made between categorizations, but is the rest of the scientific community likely to listen to them? Might we argue that the ‘planetary scientists’ have a vested interest in including as many objects under their purvey as possible? Is this why they’re upset?
Should we take this to the logical extreme and ask about the opinion of the plutoid scientists, I bet they’re nearly unanimous in their support for the new classification, otherwise they’re out of a job, right? If there aren’t any, then I will declare myself to be one… and yes, my convention is unanimous. Does this sound silly to you?
What if all the quartz scientists decided to break from the geologists and call their crystal of choice bauxite. Would it be ok? Would it REALLY be up to them?

Please, let’s do better than the current administration and keep our politics and turf wars out of science. What Pluto is called has ZERO bearing on what it is or what scientific discoveries can be made there. The fact that there are scientists spending their grant money having debates about the classification of a single object strikes me as a terrible waste of intellect. Why don’t we figure out how Pluto and other similar objects formed instead of debating what they’re called?

I’ll admit that the designation _may_ have some impact on what funding is available, and I’m betting that’s where the rubber really meets the road isn’t it.

I believe that any planet definition cannot be based solely on where an object is but must take into account what that object is. Otherwise, we have a system like the current IAU definition that is biased against planets further from the sun, which have larger orbital neighborhoods to “clear.” Stating that an object must harbor intelligent life as we know it to be considered a planet is way too anthropomorphic. Using that logic, one could conclude that Earth is the only planet in our solar system.

I agree with you that it is at the boundaries where definitions blur, but we know enough about Pluto to know that it does not fall anywhere near those boundaries. We have enough images of Pluto to know that it is round and in a state of hydrostatic equilibrium. It is cases like Vesta, where we know an impact lobbed off the south pole of a previously round object, that are at the boundaries. Of course, New Horizons will likely surprise us with its findings, but I don’t think it’s going to find that Pluto is lopsided or not round. In fact, it is far more likely that New Horizons’ findings will illustrate the presence of the same geophysical processes that occur on what we now call the “classical planets.”