Pluto may be a “dwarf” planet, but it is still a planet.
In 2006, the International Astronomical Union, responding to the discovery of several Pluto-like objects in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, decided to limit the number of planets in our solar system to eight, and to create a new class of “dwarf” planets.
The adjective doesn’t bother Jim Christy, the retired astronomer from Flagstaff who discovered the first and largest moon of Pluto — Charon.
“There are giant stars and dwarf stars, but they’re all stars,” Christy said. “Same with planets.”
Mark Sykes, of the Planetary Science Institute, has taken Pluto’s side in debates over its status with celebrity astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson and others. He now calls Pluto “the king of the dwarf planets.”
People are also reading…
“I don’t mind ‘dwarf,’ but one has to recognize that it’s an adjective and not part of a compound noun,” Sykes said.
As for the IAU designation: “We’ve ignored them. It’s not relevant to us.”
Marc Buie, a former Lowell Observatory astronomer who now works at Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and is a member of the New Horizons science team, says simply on his website:
“Whatever happens in the future you can still call Pluto a planet and if you forget to include the word ‘dwarf’ I won’t mind at all.”
Alan Stern, chief scientist at Southwest Research Institute who is leading the New Horizons mission to Pluto, has also led the fight to change the IAU definition, or to persuade planetary scientists to simply ignore it.
Stern is convinced the public will have the last say on the topic, after cameras aboard the spacecraft send photos Earthward that unveil Pluto’s topography in detail. “We’re about to turn a point of light into a planet.”
