ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, March 12, 1996 TAG: 9603120054
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
COLUMN: Reporter's Notebook
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER
When I was in seventh grade and our teacher had us studying a smattering of astronomy in our geography course, a classmate decided that I must be kidding him when I listed the name of our solar system's ninth planet.
"Pluto?" he said. "Pluto's the name of Mickey Mouse's dog!"
That teacher taught us so much about planets in that short segment that, when we took exploratory science the following year and a new teacher started us off with astronomy, it seemed that we knew more about it than she did. She quickly switched us to chemistry, which we found much more difficult. It was the same kind of mistake we'd made years earlier when we let on to our parents that we knew the truth about the Tooth Fairy.
I was reminded about Pluto recently while jumping back and forth between public radio and Rush Limbaugh while driving to an assignment in Pulaski. Yes, I confess, I am one of those liberal running dogs of the news media who enjoys listening to Limbaugh on occasion.
Rush was perturbed because, it seems, there was a movement afoot in scientific circles to downgrade the status of Pluto from a planet to a mere asteroid or cometary fragment. He saw this, probably with his tongue firmly planted in his cheek (although it's sometimes hard to tell with Rush), as an international conspiracy to downgrade the U.S. of A. because Pluto is the only planet to have been discovered by one of us.
Rick Fisher, a faculty member at the Southwest Virginia Governor's School and curator at the Wysor Observatory on the Dublin Elementary School grounds, said the speculation is that Pluto may be one of the cometary bodies from the Oort Cloud, a bunch of cosmic debris even farther away from the sun than Pluto.
Pluto's discoverer was Clyde Tombaugh who, in 1930, spotted the tiny dot of light on some photographic plates he was examining with a microscope. It took both a telescope and a microscope to pinpoint Pluto.
Tombaugh had predicted the existence of a ninth planet 15 years earlier, and found it just about where he thought it would be. He and others based similar predictions on some unseen heavenly body seeming to influence, albeit slightly, the movements of the giant planets Uranus and Neptune.
Now, it turns out, Pluto is such a small body that it couldn't influence anything, certainly not Uranus with its diameter of some 32,000 miles. (Rush also quibbled about a change in the pronunciation of that planet. It's now called UR-an-us; Rush grew up with YOU-rain-us. Faculty member Bob Carlson's theory is that the change in emphasis occurred because teachers were having too much trouble controlling the laughter of their students over the earlier pronunciation.)
Just as Jonathan Swift predicted two moons for Mars in "Gulliver's Travels" before we knew about them, Jack Williamson - who has been publishing stories for seven decades now - predicted a moon for Pluto in his "Legion of Space" stories that started back in the 1930s. He named the moon Cerebus. Sure enough, a Plutonian satellite was discovered in 1978, but it was named Charon.
Fisher noted that Pluto also has lost its distinction of being the most distant planetary body from the sun. It occasionally crosses the orbit of Neptune, which it did a few years ago, making Neptune the outer-most planet. The two bodies will cross one another's orbits again in 1999, making Pluto the ninth whatever-it-turns-out-to-be once more.
LENGTH: Medium: 64 linesby CNB