Demotion sparks protests

Astronomers ruled that debris in Pluto's orbit relegated the tiny orb to the category 'dwarf planet.'
LONG ISLAND NEWSDAY
First came the petitions.
Then the angry mnemonics, like "My! Very educated morons just screwed up numerous planetariums." And, inevitably, the bumper stickers: "Honk if Pluto is still a planet."
The United States is arguably a much noisier place, judging by the sheer volume of protests lodged in the two months since several hundred members of the International Astronomical Union voted to define what constitutes a planet, booting Pluto in the process.
Pluto orbits the sun and is nearly round, but the majority ruled it hadn't cleared the celestial "neighborhood around its orbit." The diminutive world just didn't have the oomph to rid its orbit of interloping ice balls in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system.
"Ridiculous!" responded Richard Fienberg, the editor in chief of Sky & amp; Telescope magazine. Scores of astronomers joined him in calling the decision process so flawed that it has rendered the definition of a planet all but meaningless.
"Practically, there's a lot of people who are just going to ignore it," said Mark Sykes, director of the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz., and a driving force behind an online petition that has said as much.
Public sentiment
Gonzalo Tancredi, a planetary astronomer at the University of Uruguay in Montevideo, disagreed, defending the "good agreement" as one based on the best available science. "Maybe it's not a perfect one, but it's the one that reflects better the present knowledge about the solar system," he said.
Far beyond the astronomical dispute, though, the demotion of Pluto spurred an upwelling of public sentiment in editorials, petitions and blogs, and spawned a Web-based cottage industry devoted to defending a distant orb one-fifth the mass of the moon. Amid the frenzy, schoolchildren repeatedly lodged the same tearful query: "What happened to Pluto?" As educators are discovering, though, the question may have opened the door to teaching the public about science --and a dirty iceball that clearly holds some sentimental value.
"It's the littlest planet, it's way out there; it's an oddball," said Mark Bullock, a planetary scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. In short, Pluto embodies the underdog. And, of course, it shares a name with the sidekick of a beloved Disney icon.
But what, exactly, defines it?
A working definition of planet -- essentially, a roundish object that orbits a star -- would have expanded our solar system's planetary clique to 12.
The effort had been necessitated by newly discovered orbs such as the Pluto-plus-sized Xena (since renamed after Eris, goddess of discord). But on the last day of a turbulent meeting in Prague, Czech Republic, the International Astronomical Union's general assembly did an about-face and dropped the planetary tally to eight, relegating Pluto, Eris and an asteroid named Ceres to "dwarf planets." Charon, another would-be planet and Pluto's main moon, didn't even make that cut.
Petition signed
Less than a week later, Sykes' petition decrying the decision had been signed by 305 scientists and stargazers from 34 states and a dozen other countries.