The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet by Neil deGrasse Tyson

international media—did our treatment of Pluto come up. I didn’t volunteer it either. Actually, the New York Post and t one or two other regional papers, in their preview of the facility, noted the absence of Pluto in our Scales of the Universe, but none of them made a big deal of it. The coast was clear. No media controversy.
    But that was just the calm before the storm.
    Then one day, a reporter for the New York Times , on his own time, decides to visit the Rose Center and just have a look around. On the Scales of the Universe walkway, the reporter overhears a child asking his mother, “Mommy, where’s Pluto?” She replies with unjustified confidence, “Check again, you’re not looking hard enough.”
    The child repeats, “Mommy, where’s Pluto?” Of course, neither of them can find Pluto because Pluto isn’t there. Meanwhile, the eavesdropping reporter is sure he’s got a story. So he calls the paper, and they put Kenneth Chang on the case. Chang, an eager, smart, young science reporter, does some investigating of his own and files a story for the Times .
    On January 22, 2001, nearly a year after opening day for the Rose Center, a full news day had passed since George W. Bush was inaugurated as the 43rd president of the United States. The election was controversial. The dimpled chads from Florida’s paper ballots were still flapping in the breeze. One might expect that day’s front page of the New York Times to be filled with stories from Washington and elsewhere, chronicling reactions to the new American president.
    Page 1 was indeed headlined “On First Day, Bush Settles Into a Refitted Oval Office—He Greets Public After Touring New Home.” But that article also shares space with other important stories, including one on U.S. intelligence estimates concerning three alleged Iraqi weapons factories, another on the pope’s newly appointed cardinals, and still another that reports on California’s race to build power plants so they may avert their perennial summertime brownouts.
    And there it was. Page 1. Kenneth Chang’s article on the Rose Center. Appearing in 55-point type was the headline that would disrupt my life for years to come:
    P LUTO’S N OT A P LANET ? O NLY IN N EW Y ORK
    The article continued across four columns of carryover, including a photo, and a diagram in Section B.
    Chang opened by retelling the frustrations of Atlanta visitor Pamela Curtis, who had to exhume from memory, then recite out loud, the time-honored planet mnemonic “My Very Educated Mother…” to establish that Pluto was, in fact, missing from the display of orbs. Then Chang went for our jugular, portraying our approach to Pluto as both renegade and suspect: 23
    Quietly, and apparently uniquely among major scientific institutions, the American Museum of Natural History cast Pluto out of the pantheon of planets when it opened the Rose Center last February. Nowhere does the center describe Pluto as a planet, but nowhere do its exhibits declare “Pluto is not a planet,” either….
    Still, the move is surprising, because the museum appears to have unilaterally demoted Pluto, reassigning it as one of more than 300 icy bodies orbiting beyond Neptune, in a region called the Kuiper Belt.
    Then came the quotes from the experts. This from planetary scientist Richard Binzel, of MIT (see Figure 3.10): “They went too far in demoting Pluto, way beyond what the mainstream astronomers think.” And this from Alan Stern, who we met on the museum’s Pluto panel: “They are a minority viewpoint…. It’s absurd. The astronomical community has settled this issue. There is no issue.”
    But if you followed the article to page B4, you learned that astronomers had been reconsidering Pluto for years:
    The International Astronomical Union, the pre-eminent society of astronomers, still calls Pluto a planet, one of nine of the solar system. Even a proposal in 1999 to list Pluto as both a planet and a member of the Kuiper Belt drew