By Carl Mead.
I learned when I was a kid that Pluto was a planet. This was a big thing for me. I loved space. I wanted to be an astronaut. I wanted to go to the planets. I wanted to know all about all the planets. I had a mobile above my bed that I had made–or maybe my brother had made it–with the planets in order, and Pluto was a small Styrofoam ball colored with a dark blue marker hanging on the outermost ring. 
In third grade, I made a Jeopardy!-style board game where players had to answer questions about the planets, and Pluto was the final spot with the hardest questions. There was the Magic School Bus episode I recorded on the VCR where Miss Frizzle took her students on a field trip to each of the planets, and Arnold, having been upset during the entire trip, reached Pluto at the end of his tether and took his helmet off, turning his head–and hair–to ice, just like in real space (Meehl and Stevenson).
None of those things is entirely important, and I realize that, but they are experiences that are all mine. And now, they’re not just unimportant; they’re meaningless. They’re archaic. On August 24, 2006, the International Astronomy Union announced its new definition of planets, which removed Pluto from consideration (Inman). And so, I and what I knew about space became wrong. If I were to dig out any one of those old things – the mobile, the board game, the VHS – and give them to my kid, however many years from now, my kid would look up at me and ask why it was wrong. Pluto’s not a planet.
Even so, Pluto’s not exactly irrelevant either. It hasn’t disappeared from our system or our culture. Pluto’s demotion initially stirred interest in astronomy, at least for a little while, as people wrestled with the announcement (Inman).
Seeing this, or perhaps recognizing that there is something special about the work of Percival Lowell and Clyde W. Tombaugh even if it wasn’t quite what they’d hoped, the International Astronomical Union created a new category of space object, variously called dwarf planets, plutons, or plutoids. This has enhanced our understanding of just what’s out there, and as we identify more and more what’s in our reach, as we make smaller cell phones and smash bosons together, discoveries like that of Tombaugh will shed some light for us when we start again to search beyond what we can already see close-up.
In 1781, William Herschell discovered Uranus. In 1846, working from irregularities in figures relating to Uranus’s orbit, John C. Adams and Urbain Le Verrier independently and nearly simultaneously discovered Neptune. From 1906 to his death in 1916, Percival Lowell unsuccessfully searched for a ninth planet following irregularities in figures relating to Neptune’s orbit. After a prolonged legal battle following Lowell’s death, Clyde W. Tombaugh continued the search for a ninth planet. In 1930, Tombaugh confirmed his discovery of Pluto and confirmed it as the ninth planet in our solar system (Arnett).
Is Tombaugh’s discovery now as meaningless as my third grade board game? On the one hand, Tombaugh would probably fade to obscurity without Pluto as his other discoveries amount to the tracking of some 800 asteroids (Darling). On the other hand, that’s not really how the declassification of Pluto would work. It’s not as though, now that Pluto is considered a dwarf planet instead of a planet, Tombaugh didn’t see the object in the sky and track its movements. He saw something which we now better understand to be a far-flung piece of the Kuiper belt, similar to the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter but much further from the sun. It was Tombaugh’s work–which was an extension of Lowell’s work, which in turn extended Le Verrier’s and Adams’s work in discovering Neptune, which was based on discoveries and figures led by Herschel in the discovery of Uranus–that led to the discovery of the Kuiper belt, but more than that, led to the investigation of the possibility of its existence. Before Tombaugh, there was no hint that anything of the magnitude of the Kuiper belt might be out there.
Also, despite being stripped of its status, Pluto maintains at least some level of unique cultural impact. For instance, there’s the cartoon dog, Pluto. Whether the Disney character is named for the planet cannot be known for certain, though it is supported by some of the people involved; Disney animators and Venetia Phair, who suggested naming the planet Pluto, give contrasting accounts (Wikipedia). In any manner, there is no denying the fact that Pluto the dog was named within two years of the naming of Pluto the planet, and without that, Pluto would have been a far less likely household name, especially considering the relative accessibility of the other “big five” of Disney: Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, and Daffy. They all end in the same diminutive sound. Pluto doesn’t sound the same at all. I would think, ordinarily, a name like Pluto would have something of a higher threshold to get over in terms of acceptability in contrast with names like Goofy and Mickey. However, drawing on alliteration, the writers at Disney drew out Playful Pluto and turned the Roman name of the god of the underworld into something for children to latch onto. The name adds something unique in that way; without Tombaugh’s discovery, Pluto would likely have defaulted to a more normal name like Fido and may have become something of a one-off. But with the name of the planet to either inspire it or at least play off of, Pluto the pup was able to become one of the Disney mainstays such that I know who he is even if I know almost nothing else about him. He’s the one that doesn’t talk, right? Whether Pluto’s a planet or not, that dog is here to stay.
On the other hand, with the demotion of Pluto, Gutav Holst’s musical suite The Planets returns–rightfully, I’d say–from eight movements to seven movements. From 1914 to 1916, Holst wrote this suite with each movement reflecting and developing the personalities of each planet drawing primarily from their characterizations in western astrology (Oxford “Holst”). As such, the movement titled “Jupiter” was not about a big red spot or a whole lot of moons, nor was it about being the lord of the gods in ancient Roman religion; instead, “Jupiter” bears the subtitle “The Bringer of Jollity” as fits its astrological characteristics. In 1930, following the discovery of Pluto, people implored Holst to write a new movement for the new planet.
Let’s ignore for a second the fact that Pluto, immediately following its discovery, likely did not have an astrological personality associated with it, and let’s also ignore the fact that adding an eighth movement would have necessitated a change in the ending of “Neptune, the Mystic,” which was one of the earliest fade-out endings in music. And then there’s the whole thing where it had been a decade and a half since he’d written the original piece, as well as the fact that his health was deteriorating to the point where he would die four years later. Ignoring all that, Holst had come to dislike the suite, seeing that it had overshadowed what he considered to be his stronger works and refused to write the new movement (Oxford).
When I first heard the piece, I wondered why there wasn’t an eighth movement myself. I was sure that over the years there were many attempts to tack one on. I didn’t know it then, but by the time I became familiar with the piece, someone had indeed written one. In 2000, Colin Matthews was commissioned to change the ending of “Neptune” write a new movement, “Pluto, the Renewer.” But it did feel tacked on, to me anyway, whether because it really wasn’t as good or because I like the original seven too much. With the new definition of planets in 2006, there was no longer any perceived need to add an eighth movement, and the Matthews could be shelved away or relegated to YouTube. And it was really all a shame because for seventy years, there were idiots like me who were saying this piece was incomplete because the number of planets had changed. But that wasn’t it at all; the planets, whether there are eight now, nine ten years ago, or six four hundred years back, are the same. They are there, wherever they are, moving around, and what we think of them has nothing to do with them. Holst’s composition wasn’t incomplete. It was complete at that point. Even that board game I made in third grade isn’t now wrong. It’s just that it now used to be right.
Works Cited
“File:Pluto’s astrological sign.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 20 Oct. 2006. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
“From the Earth to the Starbucks.” Writ. Steve Franks. Psych. USA. 26 Jan. 2007.
“Gets Lost in Space.” Writ. Brian Meehl and Jocelyn Stevenson. The Magic School Bus. PBS. 10 Sept. 1994.
“Holst, Gustav.” Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, 5 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
“Matthews, Colin.” Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press, 5 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
“Pluto (Disney).” Wikipedia. Wikipedia, 5 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
Arnett, Bill. “Pluto,” “Neptune,” “Uranus,” and “Chronology of Solar System Discovery.” Nine Planets: A multimedia tour of one sun, eight planets, and more. Ed. Bill Arnett. N.p., 2 June 2007. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
Darling, David. “Tombaugh, Clyde W.” Encyclopedia of Science. Ed. David Darling. N.p., 4 Nov. 2012. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.
Inman, Mason. “Pluto Not a Planet, Astronomers Rule.” National Geographic Online. National Geographic, 24 Aug. 2006. Web. 5 Nov. 2012.