Date: June 11, 2011
Title: “Why I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming!”
Podcaster: Richard Drumm
Organization: Charlottesville Astronomical Society in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Links: Richard’s blog is at http://theastronomybum.blogspot.com/
Description: Richard Drumm, the Astronomy Bum, talks with planet finder (and Pluto killer) Dr. Mike Brown from Caltech about Brown’s book, “Why I Killed Pluto and Why It Had it Coming” and the confusion of whether Pluto is a planet or not.
Bio: Richard Drumm is President of the Charlottesville Astronomical Society in Charlottesville, Virginia.
His blog is at http://theastronomybum.blogspot.com/
He’s the owner of 3D – Drumm Digital Design, an award-winning video production company. He was an observer with the UVa Parallax Program at McCormick Observatory in 1981 & 1982. He’s found that his greatest passion in life is public outreach astronomy and he pursues it at every opportunity.
Sponsor: This episode of “365 Days of Astronomy” is sponsored by John Sandlin. The Sandlin Family wishes you all Clear Skies.
Transcript:
[RBD] Thanks again to George Hrab for that wonderful musical introduction. If you don’t listen to the GeoLogic Podcast yet, you should! Hello, I’m Richard Drumm The Astronomy Bum, (exasperatedly) yes, the astronomy bum… Any rate, I’m here today at the Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum near Dulles Airport in Washington, D.C. and I’m here today with Doctor Mike Brown of CalTech! Well, good afternoon Doctor Brown!
[MEB] Thanks, good to be here.
[RBD] This new book that you’ve got here, “How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming” is a fabulous, fabulous book! I can’t remember the last time I had a book that was GLUED to my hands this way. I could’ve done it in one day if I’d started in the morning, but I started in the afternoon. I could not put it down!
[MEB] I’m thrilled to hear that! I’m really glad people seem to be liking the book.
[RBD] What sort of reviews has it gotten from the mainstream press?
[MEB] It’s done quite well. It’s a story that people sort of know about and so they have found the book and are expecting to find something, but it’s been well reviewed and in fact, just today it’s the New York Times Editor’s Pick of the Week. Very nice reviews everywhere else, so it’s done very well.
[RBD] (To passersby at the museum book signing) No, no, in fact we WANT interruptions here. Step right up!
[MEB] (To a kid.) Do you know why Pluto got killed? Can I show you why Pluto got killed? What do you think about Pluto? Do you know any… Do you know… Are you a little mad about Pluto?
[Kid] (Amused exhale.)
[MEB] Did you learn that Pluto was a planet first and then it wasn’t a planet. Or did you just learn that Pluto isn’t a planet?
[Kid] I learned that Pluto was a planet…
[MEB] You learned that it WAS, and then you learned that it WASN’T?
[Kid] Mmmhmmm.
[MEB] So, lemme, here’s why I think a lot of people were confused about Pluto and if it should be a planet or not. So, how old are you?
[Kid] Um, seven.
[MEB] Seven, OK. So I have a daughter who’s 5. So a little younger than you. And she has a lunchbox that has planets on it. Do you have any friends who have these planet lunchboxes? Have you ever seen these planet lunchboxes?
[Kid] Yeah.
[MEB] So on the planet lunchboxes, its got all the planets on there, sometimes with Pluto as a planet and sometimes not. And they’re all kind of the same size. Um. But, but in real live they’re not the same size at all. Do you know how small Pluto really is?
[Kid] No.
[MEB] So lemme show you, lemme show you the actual pictures of the solar system and see if you can find Pluto. So here are the planets, their real sizes. There’s Jupiter and Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, there’s even some asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. Um, Pluto’s on there. Do you see Pluto? Can you find it?
[Kid] No.
[MEB] It’s, and that’s why it’s not a planet, because it’s so small it’s actually THAT, right there. That little dot is Pluto. It’s a tiny, tiny, tiny little thing. But most people when they learn about it they think it’s really big because they have lunchboxes and placemats and all the rest of it. So, so that’s what really happened, it’s, it’s the astronomers realizing that Pluto’s kind of small and there are a lot of other things around it that are the same size. These guys are called Kuiper Belt Objects or dwarf planets or something out there, and those (pointing to the larger circles on the diagram) are the ones that are planets.
So that’s, that’s the main story.
[Kid] Thank you.
[MEB] You’re welcome!
I, I mean, I could, I could just sit here and harass every little kid that comes by cause that’s the fun part!
[RBD] So, tell me, what’s it like getting hate mail from little kids?
[MEB] It’s, you know it’s pretty cute in many ways, because if you get a, if you get hate mail from little kids you know that they’re emotionally invested in something. And the fact that they’re emotionally invested in the solar system is a pretty cool thing. So even though I’d rather that they didn’t hate me about it I still kinda like it.
[RBD] Now, are the kindergardeners now, the younger ones, are they more accepting of Pluto being of a uh, an improved status as the King of the Plutoids?
[MEB] It’s not the King of the Plutoids, of course, Eris is the King, the most massive at least of the Plutoids. So my daughter’s is in kindergarden now and she has taught all the other kids exactly the right way to think about the solar system. And they all know that Pluto’s not a planet and there’re 8 planets and they know why. The only one of my entire kindergarden class, the only one who is a little bit mad at me about Pluto being killed is my daughter herself. She knows that killing is bad and she’s kinda mad that I did it. But she has a solution. And her solution is I just need to go find something else and name it Pluto and then she’ll be happy.
[RBD] So tell me, what instrument and camera are you using now?
[MEB] That’s a good question, so there’re a couple different things for all the different surveys that’re going on that we’re using, but one of the things that’s going on is a deep search of the Southern skies. There’re actually 3 of those, 4 actually going on, finally after no one doing it for a hundred years there are finally some. The one that I’m involved in is being done with the uh, the SkyMapper Telescope that’s being run out of Australia National University. It’s a custom-built telescope designed to map the Southern skies. So that’s being done, but there’re also two other searches of the Southern Hemisphere being done out of Chile too. So that’s exciting. The other big telescope that’s going deeper, looking for more distant things is actually the very fantastic Subaru telescope, the Japanese National Telescope on Mauna Kea, right next to the Keck Telescope which I use a lot, is that one. And it’s fantastic because it has the widest field of view of any large telescope in the world. So it’s a fantastic resource to use too.
[RBD] What about New Horizons? What do you expect other than the unexpected, from the 2015 flyby?
[MEB] Well you stole my answer because I mean, it’s the unexpected that in all these spacecraft missions when you see something like that for the first time… It’s like, I remember the day of the Huygens landing, and my picture in my head of what Titan was going to be like, and I spent a lot of time studying Titan in addition to the Kuiper Belt. So I had a very concrete picture of what it was gonna be like. And, you know, the concrete picture I had one day and the actual picture the next day are entirely different things. And that’s what’s gonna happen to Pluto. There will be very clear discoveries of things that we sort of know, you know, there’ll be views of what the atmospheric cycling is like. There’ll be a better measurement of the SIZE, which is actually… These days people care about because right now Pluto and Eris seem to be within 10 or 20 kilometers of the same size. And, and nobody knows which is bigger because we don’t know Pluto’s size very well. We know Eris’s size much better than Pluto’s.
[RBD] Where would you like New Horizons to go AFTER Pluto? Cause Ixion and Quaoar are out in that section of the sky…
[MEB] Well, no, there’s nothing known that New Horizons could get to because it’s going by so fast and Pluto is so tiny that there’s no way to really change its trajectory at all. I mean a little bit, there’s a little bit of fuel left so you can do minor, minor corrections. So basically that bullet is on its way and what you have to do is find something in its path rather than go anywhere. So my hope is that some very small Kuiper Belt object will be in the pathway and since we don’t know of anything there the most likely thing IS very small, but that’s actually very exciting. I would much rather go to one of the larger Kuiper Belt objects, Pluto, and then also go to a smaller one, and see the diversity rather than, you know, people have said “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice to go to Pluto and then go to Eris?” Well, first off, it’s in the wrong direction, but more importantly, Pluto and Eris are going to look similar in many ways, but Pluto and a small Kuiper Belt object are gonna be really interesting. So I’m pretty excited to go to an entirely anonymous object out at the edge of the solar system.
[RBD] Uh, so, Mike, where does your search lead you next, do you think?
[MEB] Well, um, there’s still the very exciting virgin territory of the Southern Hemisphere, which I’m very excited about. More than anything else, I’m excited about whatever is beyond the Kuiper Belt of which we now know one thing beyond the Kuiper Belt, Sedna. And the fact that Sedna exists it’s a lighthouse telling us that there’s a lot out there. And it’s been very hard to find anything else out in that region, it’s SO far away, the rest of the objects are presumably so small that we have been struggling. With some of the new telescopes, the new instruments coming on line in the next couple of years, we really should start to now know that region like we started to know the Kuiper Belt itself nearly 20 years ago now.
[RBD] And so it’s like Sedna is saying “But wait, there’s more!”
[MEB] There’s more and you know the further you go in the solar system, in um, some sense you’re going backwards in time, The further you are away, the, the less processing has happened to the objects, they’ve spent less time in the inner solar system, they’re not heated up, they’re more pristine. But they’re also more pristine not just sort of chemically, but they’re more pristine dymanically, their orbits are more pristine. The orbits of all the things in the inner solar system have ALL been kicked around by the giant planets multiple times over the past 4 1/2 billion years. Sedna, we still don’t know how Sedna got on it’s peculiar orbit, but since it’s been there for the past 4 1/2 billion years, it has not moved. It is a fossil record of whatever put it there 4 1/2 billion years ago. So if we could find more parts of that fossil record, we’d be able to read the conditions of the earliest solar systems, and that’s one of the things that I’m most excited about trying to do.
[RBD] Since I’m from Charlottesville, the home of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, and I, sort of have to ask: How would ALMA, the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, fit into the Kuiper Belt/Oort Cloud uh, hunting process?
[MEB] So, so ALMA is very exciting. ALMA won’t be used for broad surveys looking for Kuiper Belt objects, but once you find something in the Kuiper Belt, it’s going to be THE premiere instrument for measuring its properties. You’ll be able to figure out the sizes of objects that we don’t know their sizes very well of, and for some of the objects, for the very biggest ones, Pluto and Eris and Makemake and all my favorite ones, they’ll actually be able to moderately resolve the object itself and make the very first maps of them that we can’t do even with things like the Hubble Space Telescope. So it’s going to be an exciting, exciting new era that’s just starting now.
[RBD] Well thank you so much, Dr. Mike Brown for, uh, talking to us!
[MEB] It’s been my pleasure.
–END–
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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