How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming - Mike Brown [94]
I wasn’t in Prague, so someone else will have to tell the details of what actually happened there. What I do know is this: Astronomers there, who I had been told were going to go along sheepishly with this mess of a proposal, revolted.
The revolting astronomers, who grew to be a sizable fraction of the astronomers present, made it quite firmly known that they would not support the secret committee proposal. The only proposal they would support would be one where Pluto was put in its logical—rather than emotional—place. Pluto, Charon, Ceres, and my own Xena would all have to go. The press, and indeed the astronomers in Prague themselves, were quite amused by the fact that one of the most vocal supporters of demoting Pluto, Charon, Ceres, and Xena was the guy who had the most to personally gain from Xena being a planet: me.
My phone calls with the press and conspiratorial e-mails with astronomers in Prague continued for most of two weeks, first from Orcas and then from Pasadena, after we returned home from our vacation. Everything was building toward the final afternoon of the final day of the IAU meeting, when the deciding vote on the definition of the word planet would finally be held.
The vote was going to be broadcast live around the world, and I was going to host a packed media event to watch it, even though afternoon in Prague was before dawn in Pasadena. By 5:00 a.m. the news crews and I were setting up in a room usually taken up by press conferences about the latest southern California earthquake. The vote on the resolution that could completely change the way people looked at the solar system was slated to take place in under an hour. That morning, the astronomers in Prague had awakened to read the final wording of the resolution to be voted upon. And the wording mattered. Cosmic distrust in Prague was running so high at this point that many assumed that the clearly pro-Pluto secret committee would attempt to subvert the clearly anti-Pluto-as-a-planet majority by sneaking in wording that would keep Pluto no matter what the vote.
Sitting at a desk in the earthquake room in Pasadena in front of the still assembling press, I projected onto a large screen a just-posted copy of the precise wordings of the resolutions, which I had found at the meeting website. Along with the news crews and, by now, a growing crowd of interested onlookers from the Caltech community, I read, for the first time:
Resolution 1: Precession Theory and Definition of the Ecliptic
I only then realized that there was more on the agenda than Pluto and that this morning might be much longer than anticipated. While I know what precession theory is, and I even knew the definition of the ecliptic, I wasn’t even slightly interested in knowing the precise definition being proposed here—and neither were most, if not all, of the astronomers in Prague.
Resolution 2: Supplement to the IAU 2000 Resolutions on reference systems
Yawn.
Resolution 3: Re-definition of the Barycentric Dynamical Time, TDB
I must have missed the original definition.
Resolution 4: Endorsement of the Washington Charter for Communicating Astronomy with the Public
I began to understand why, until now, no one had ever gone to the voting part of these meetings.
Resolution 5A: Definition of “planet”
Finally! I quickly read through the definition. Though confusingly worded and perhaps poorly thought through (not surprising, given that the final wording had probably been hammered out late in the night), the definition led to reasonable results. It even included a footnote that clearly stated, “The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune,” and that Pluto and Xena, along with the asteroid Ceres, were to be called “dwarf planets,” a term no one had ever heard before. The resolution was clear