The Pending Disappearance of Pluto (1980)

Today I tuned in to The Great Planet Debate, which finally spurred me to my first post to this new blog. As part of a greater "scientific conference and educator workshop" at Johns Hopkins, Neil deGrasse Tyson took on Mark Sykes in a webcasted debate about Pluto and the definition of the word "planet". It was pretty entertaining! (Not at all like I imagine the 1920 Shapley-Curtis Debate about the size of the Universe went down, but I'm still waiting for them to post that webcast online.)  It also provided nice exposure to the public about what science is and is not (or should not be). I recommend that you check it out, once the full webcast is posted at the above site (in the next 2 weeks).

In the course of the debate, they brought attention to an article that appeared in the journal Eos in 1980, called "From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: The Pending Disappearance of Pluto." It turns out that in 1848, the estimated mass of the not-yet-discovered Pluto was about 12 times the mass of the Earth. A number of renowned astronomers weighed in on the matter over the following century, revising the estimate downward. The decline was slow at first but by the 1970s, its mass was dropping at an alarming rate! Taking all of these renowned astronomers seriously, Dessler and Russell forecast that Pluto would disappear entirely by the year 1984. (But it would return! Read on if you're interested...)



Ah, science! This reminds me, I should try to find the old-old journal article about determining the color of Mars by comparing it with paint samples.