Is Pluto 'the Woody Allen of the solar system'?

Email the author | Follow on Twitter
on January 13, 2010 at 10:41 AM, updated January 13, 2010 at 10:50 AM

boyle.JPGAlan Boyle
When the International Astronomical Union downgraded Pluto from planet to dwarf planet in 2006, reaction was mixed. Some people said the IAU got it right, that Pluto is a dwarf planet and doesn't belong in the same category as the big boys, like Saturn with its fancy rings and Jupiter with its mighty moons.

Others were outraged. The New Mexico House of Representatives passed a resolution stating Pluto will always be a planet over New Mexican skies, even though it was discovered at the Lowell Observatory in neighboring Arizona. The American Dialect Society chose "to pluto" -- meaning "to demote or devalue someone or something" -- as its 2006 word of the year. (The same group chose "truthiness," the term coined by Stephen Colbert, as its 2005 word of the year.)

In Redmond, Wash., Alan Boyle followed the Pluto controversy closely on Cosmic Log, his popular blog. Boyle, the science editor for, works out of an office on the Microsoft campus. As a former editor at the Seattle Post-Intelligencer and the Spokane Spokesman-Review, he knows a good story when he sees one and was delighted when an editor at John Wiley & Sons asked him to write a book about Pluto and its fall from planethood.

"The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference" is lively and informative, but since Boyle is an occasional "talking head of last resort," as he calls himself, on MSNBC, let's make him boil his book down to a single talking point. What is the case for Pluto?

"I can make it in five words: Dwarf planets are planets, too," Boyle said.

That was easy, but there's always been some doubters about Pluto being planet-worthy. When Clyde Tombaugh saw a speck that appeared to move when he compared photographic plates in 1930, "he thought he might be missing something," Boyle said. "He thought it would be bigger than Earth."

It's not. Pluto's mass is about 0.2 percent of Earth's. It's a long way away, and it's really hard to see. On the other hand. ...

"What is Pluto's strange appeal?" Boyle said. "Why is it the Woody Allen of the solar system?"

Well, it has a cool name. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium and the author of "The Pluto Files," thinks people grew up remembering Pluto because of its association with the Disney cartoon dog. (The dog was named after the planet, not the other way around. Plutonium also is named after Pluto.) Boyle thinks it's not the dog but the underdog, that Pluto is "the oddball runt of the planetary litter. It needs to eat more and bulk up to be like the other planets. It's the weird uncle with the squirting lapel flower."

The controversy over Pluto's demotion kicked into overdrive when another, bigger dwarf planet called Eris was discovered in 2005. "If Pluto is looking around for somebody to blame," Boyle said, it need look no farther than Eris. Really, though, the whole affair does show how the world changes and how science adjusts to those changes. Dwarf planets are planets, too.

Boyle makes "The Case for Pluto" at 4 p.m. Saturday at Powell's Technical Books, 33 N.W. Park Ave.

-- Jeff Baker