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

fierce protest from people who felt that the additional “minor planet” designation would diminish Pluto’s stature….
    But even some astronomers defending Pluto admit that were it discovered today, it might not be awarded planethood, because it is so small—only about 1,400 miles wide—and so different from the other planets….
    As a planet, Pluto has always been an oddball. Its composition is like a comet’s. Its elliptical orbit is tilted 17 degrees from the orbits of the other planets….
    But Pluto continued to be called a planet, because there was nothing else to call it. Then, in 1992, astronomers found the first Kuiper Belt object. Now they have found hundreds of additional chunks of rock and ice beyond Neptune, including about 70 that share orbits similar to Pluto’s, the so-called Plutinos.
    Buttressing the case was a diagram titled “To Be, or Not to Be, a Planet,” showing Pluto as a midway point between the planets Earth and Mercury on one side, and the not-planets Ceres and 2000 EB173 on the other; its label stating that “Pluto is bigger than minor planets and has an atmosphere,” and yet “Pluto has an unusual orbit and is made largely of ice.”
    Chang quoted me in several paragraphs, where I defended our treatment of Pluto. And in the final paragraph, I got to reprise the concluding words from my “Pluto’s Honor” essay with the comment that Pluto would surely be happier as king of the Kuiper belt than as the puniest planet. One of the later remarks came from a scientist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, which was building a new space sciences center but would continue to display Pluto as one of nine:
    “We’re sticking with Pluto,” said Dr. Laura Danly, curator of space sciences at the Denver museum. “We like Pluto as a planet.”
    But, she also said, “I think there is no right or wrong on this issue. It’s a moving target right now, no pun intended, what is and is not a planet.”
    People don’t always read articles to the end. Laura Danly’s candor that Pluto’s classification was a moving target came in the last column. We would later attract Danly from Colorado to become our museum’s director of astrophysics education before she would move once more to become curator of education at the newly renovated Griffith Observatory and Planetarium in Los Angeles.
    In the end, it was the Times headline writer who got the last word. “Pluto’s Not a Planet? Only in New York” became the takeaway, rather than the more accurate (unwritten) title “Pluto’s Not a Planet? A Growing Number of Professionals Agree.”
    So on January 22, 2001, beginning at about 7 a.m., my phone started ringing. My voice mail filled (I never knew before that day the voice mail capacity for our phone system). My e-mail in-box overflowed. And my life would never again be the same.
     
    It’s always a little scary when the person who hired you calls you up and asks, “What have you done?!” In my case, the fellow on the phone was Michael Novacek, an accomplished paleontologist and the museum’s provost. Keep in mind that I was relatively new at the institution—a youngish upstart in charge of the science content for $230 million worth of the museum’s money.
    Of course, the museum, a research institution as well as a place where you find exhibits, is right to be concerned about its scientific integrity. So when it gets dragged through the mud by a page 1 news story about its treatment of a scientific issue, the people on top want to know why. And so, perhaps out of concern that I had strong-armed my own personal view into an institutional posture, Novacek asked whether I had downgraded Pluto on my own or had built some kind of consensus behind the decision. My answer, of course, was that all internal and external members of my scientific advisory committee had reviewed the matter, and the exhibit treatment represented a consensus.
    Regardless, the museum sought a quick second opinion from