Somehow I missed this earlier last month: Eris, the non-planet whose discovery helped impel Pluto's downgrade, may not have been bigger than Pluto after all. Can this be? We lost Pluto for nothing? Can we have a do-over? In the New York Times this morning, novelist Michael Byers attempts to be sane about all of this: "If Pluto’s odyssey teaches us anything, it’s that whenever we think we’ve discovered a measure of certainty about the universe, it’s often fleeting, and more often pure dumb luck." And further:
All of which is to say, science is imperfect. It is a human enterprise, subject to passions and whims, accidents and luck. Astronomers have since discovered dozens of other objects in our solar system approaching Pluto’s size, amounting to a whole separate class of orbiting bodies. And just this week, researchers announced that they had identified 1,235 possible planets in other star systems. We can mourn the demotion of our favorite planet. But the best way to honor Lowell and Tombaugh is to celebrate the fact that Pluto — while never quite the world it was predicted to be — is part of a universe more complex, varied and surprising than even its discoverers could have imagined.
I suppose I can live with that. Schoolchildren may still be upset, though.
