Neil deGrasse Tyson

Traces the history of Pluto and the recent debate over its planethood, citing its entrenchment in America's cultural and patriotic view of the cosmos to explain its considerable popularity and the reasons behind why so many people campaigned for the preservation of its status. By the author of Death by Black Hole. 50,000 first printing.

The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet

The Pluto Files

An exploration of the controversy surrounding Pluto and its planet status from a renowned astrophysicist at the heart of the controversy.

Christina Hufford

I'm reminded of that quote from a child's review of a book that said: "This book told me more about penguins than I cared to know." Only substitute penguins for Pluto. I KID, I KID. 

No, I feel very informed about Pluto as a planetary object, and this was really a fascinating read, but I have to say, I came out of this book with Dr. Tyson's same conclusion: WHY DID THIS CAUSE SO MUCH CONTROVERSY? The book ends with a cartoon of a news bulletin proclaiming Pluto was no longer a planet, with a picture of Pluto thinking "Like I'm supposed to give a shit?" It's fascinating that some people devoted so much anger and effort into defending Pluto's status as a planet, invoking sentimentality and tradition, when the very nature of science is objectivity and the pursuit of FACTS. Classification and random distinction of labels doesn't change anything about Pluto, it's still out there, spinning around, so the people that got so vitriolic and emotional that we were demoting Pluto, we were shaming it, we were ruining childhoods -- for crying out loud! Who cares? 

The analogy to Ceres is spot-on -- astronomers thought Ceres was a small planet between Mars and Jupiter. Then, oh shit, it's surrounded by all these other small planetoid objects, what's going on? Ohhh, they realized, Ceres is just one object of many in what we'll call the asteroid belt. When Pluto was discovered, it was figured, like Ceres to be a planet, the only difference was that it was so far away, and space technology at the time had so far to advance, that we didn't see the rest of the ice chunks and orbital dregs floating out there that made Pluto not so much a planet, as one of the largest bodies in a newfound region called the Kuiper Belt (basically the trans-Neptunian version of the asteroid belt, more ice chunk than space rock because of its vast distance from the sun.) I DON'T KNOW, THAT ALL SEEMS SO SCIENCE-Y AND OF SOUND LOGIC, that the idea that these learned professionals, pioneers in their fields, were reduced to BICKERING over this distant hunk of rock and ice is ... I was going to say laughable but actually it's kind of adorable. Aw, bless. Look at the Plutophiles, getting all hot and bothered. 

I think that's what I loved most about this book. Dr. Tyson laid out the history, the facts, the science, the argument, then quoted all the people getting up in arms and replied to each blog post and newspaper article with basically the intellectual equivalent of "LOL U MAD?" Watch out, guys, we've got a badass over here.

The Pluto Files The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet

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