It's smaller than the Moon, and your mom

Apparently, I talk more about Pluto than I do about anything else in astronomy in the blog. To me, that betrays two things: I don't have a deep enough interest in astronomy to study it for a living, and I am passionate about how people are under-informed about this world's proper, albeit poorly named, status.

I'm breaking this rant down based on all the foolish reasons my home state's Senate has used to justify their resolution for Pluto being a planet as it passes "overhead through Illinois' night skies."

WHEREAS, Dr. Tombaugh is so far the only Illinoisan and only American to ever discover a planet;

This operates on the conceit that Pluto may be defined as a planet. If that is the case, then Eris must be defined as a planet as well. The discovers of Eris are all American, and one (Chad Trujillo) grew up in Oak Park, Illinois.

WHEREAS, For more than 75 years, Pluto was considered the ninth planet of the Solar System;

Yeah, and when Pluto was initially discovered, people thought it was the gas giant they were calling "Planet X" (not ten, ecks). It wasn't until Charon was discovered thirty years ago that we were sure Pluto was so small. Also, Ceres, along with three other asteroids, were considered planets for over forty years, losing the title when it was determined in the 1840s they weren't the only objects in that orbit. Pluto isn't the only object in a 2:3 resonant orbit with Neptune. Hence the creation of the "plutino" designation.

WHEREAS, A spacecraft called New Horizons was launched in January 2006 to explore Pluto in the year 2015;

So the eff what? People want to know about this iceball. The spacecraft Dawn is going to a couple of asteroids (including Ceres) in 2011. We have sent probes to comets and asteroids (and have more planned) in the past. Why does this POS statement qualify as "whereas"? Why has my rhetoric escalated?

WHEREAS, Pluto has three moons: Charon, Nix, and Hydra;

Oh yeah, for reasons as inane as this. Mercury and Venus have no moons; does the Illinois Senate want to demote them? Eris is orbited by Dysnomia; that's why we know it is bigger than Pluto. Some of the asteroids have natural satellites around them as well. Whoop-dee-doo.

WHEREAS, Pluto's average orbit is more than three billion miles from the sun (sic);

OK, my opinion of the last three clauses show I probably don't know enough about legislation. I'm guessing these are either here as padding, or to properly define Pluto in the legislation. I like how the last statement ignores that Pluto's orbit is unlike any of the eight planets, signifying to me that it isn't one of the major non-stellar objects in the Solar System. Its orbit is very elliptical, and its orbital plane is far off of those of the planets. That tells me that when the cloud of stuff that formed the Sun condensed into a disk, the ice and rock that formed Pluto was not very involved in that particular coalescence.

WHEREAS, Pluto was unfairly downgraded to a "dwarf" planet (sic) in a vote in which only 4 percent of the International Astronomical Union's 10,000 scientists participated;

The first clause is seethingly subjective, especially for a Democratic-run body whose party claimed to want to get politics out of science during the Bush Administration. As for the second clause, have they never heard of union representatives? Do they expect a quorum of IAU members to descend on Prague? The UN General Assembly does not consist of the entire governments from each country, or even a representative from each branch of government. Some universities only had one professor attend this vote, because that's all their budget would allow. Would you prefer an online vote?

WHEREAS, Many respected astronomers believe Pluto's full planetary status should be restored;

Seriously? You pulled the "many" card? The same majority party whose constituents may hate it when the "many" card is thrown out by evolution opponents, or by those who don't think that climate change is a real concern?

This is journalistic laziness, and if it is considered germane for legislation, then I want no part of it.

Pluto is now a plutino and a plutoid

A follow-up on a previous post is in order, since the International Astronomical Union (IAU) gave a new arbitrary designation to dwarf planets outside of Neptune's orbit. As opposed to calling it the No Ceres Club, they are calling these objects "plutoids." Apparently, committees were formed and had to convene during IAU conferences and everything. All that work to think up the word "plutoid." Great. At least I don't have to say "dwarf planet" as often, I guess.

Three weeks since a post, and I come back nitpicking

A press release shown at space.com and at MSNBC's website discusses the results of a study on the spiral arms of the Galaxy. (Just to pretend that I'm an educator, when I capitalize "galaxy," I'm referring to our galaxy, the Milky Way. Also, the word galaxy comes from from the Greek word "galaktikos," meaning "milky.")

The article informs us that with improved observations thanks to the Spitzer Space Telescope, two of the spiral arms of the galaxy are noticeably denser than the other two, lending support to the theory of the Galaxy having a central bar. Stop me if I've lost you.

Since brevity is paramount in crafting headlines, they all claim that the Milky Way has lost two arms, as if they fell off due to leprosy or a knife fight*. I was gonna say this bothers me like how headlines seemed to imply that Pluto disappeared after its demotion, but I don't think that was ever the case. So, I will say this bothers me like how the IAU chose to call anything that isn't a planet a "dwarf planet," which makes people think the "dwarf" part is superfluous. Couldn't they use the term "microplanet," "planetoid," "planetesimal," or something else that is hard for people to spell correctly?

Here's my extra-silly suggestion: Make it like RPG levels. (Stop here if you don't care. I'm serious.)

Objects that orbit the Sun but aren't round are level 1 planets, e.g. all the asteroids except one.
Objects that are large enough to be round are level 2 (Pluto, Eris, Ceres).
Objects that have cleared their orbital region are level 3 (Mercury).
Level 4 could be an atmosphere requirement that would would be somewhere around the thickness of Mars, either above or below.
Level 5 would require enough mass to retain hydrogen in the atmosphere, which would include Jupiter through Neptune, and Level 6 could separate the more hydrogen-rich giants from the giants rich in methane and ammonia.

I would stop here, because if Jupiter were over 12 times more massive, it would be able fuse nucleii. Not hydrogen, mind you, but it still transcends the heavy rock phase to the hot burning object phase. However, it gives me a jumping off point for this horrid digression, because these objects are unfortunately named "brown dwarfs."



*That's a big knife. And a big knife fight.

A timeline

My drop-dead date for graduation in May is March 28. I have to schedule a final oral examination by then (three weeks in advance), which I presume means I have to have a thesis draft in my committee's hands by that date as well.

Failing that, I have to have my final oral examination by May 19 (scheduled in the last week of April), lest I have to register for classes in the summer. If I have to do that, I probably won't have a teaching assistantship waiting for me, which means no in-state tuition waiver, no tuition covered by the graduate college, and no tuition covered by the department.

Is it getting warm in here?

Big day

The gloves have officially come off.

Also, look at this ISD article, where they "quote" Casey Luskin as saying Gonzalez has a "stellar reputation as a cosmologist and an astrologer."

Now, I certainly don't agree with ID or its proponents, but I don't think Luskin believes in astrology. I couldn't find that quoted in the DM Register, or anywhere else, and found him quoted online as saying "Astrology isn't real. ID is."

That tells me that ISD really needs a freaking copy editor. They started misspelling Gonzalez's name midway through the article. Such morons.

P.S. I'd say more about the e-mail controversy, but that would not be good for me or anybody.

Just so y'all can gauge my insanity

The following is an open letter:

Dear sky,

I didn't appreciate how you jerked me around this evening. I wanted to go out to the observatory to take some photos. However, I saw the weather forecast called for a mostly cloudy evening, so I was reluctant.

Around sunset, I looked up at you. You didn't look so bad. I called up my research partner, and we agreed to meet at 10 P.M.

I looked outside again at 8:30, and saw you were displaying several stars. It's gonna be a productive night, I thought to myself.

Flash forward to 9:45. I'm hurrying home to get my bag, look at you, and find you overcast. You didn't look promising for the rest of the evening, either. I cancel the trip (about a half hour each way).

Just now, as I was returning my computer to school, I saw that you partially opened up. The hole in the clouds above me formed a giant gaping mouth, where the stars' scintillations represented dozens of tongues giving me a cosmic raspberry.

Go to hell, heavens.

GGG