By Dale McFeatters*
Another of life's sixth-grade verities is in danger. Since 1930, with the discovery of Pluto, it has been received wisdom that the solar system consisted of nine planets, eight of them named after Roman gods.
For a certain generation, this lesson was reinforced by "Captain Video," a sci-fi show in the early days of TV with surpassingly cheesy sets and props. ("This may look like a Boy Scout flashlight but it's actually a Jovian death ray."). The cast of characters included extraterrestrials dressed to represent their planets. Mars wore a suit of Roman armor that looked as if it had been filched from a high school production of "Julius Caesar." Mercury wore a doughboy's helmet with wings pasted to it. Neptune had a cardboard trident. For obvious reasons there was no Uranus. We Video Rangers may have been a guileless bunch but not that guileless. There was, as I recall, no Pluto, there being not much use for a god of the underworld in the show's bland and incoherent plots. In any case, Pluto was becoming known less as a pagan deity than a cartoon dog.
But further humiliation may be in for Pluto.
A recent discovery casts
doubts on Pluto's standing as a planet. Astronomers Michael Brown and Chadwick Trujillo
this summer discovered what is being variously called a planetoid or miniplanet, the
largest solar object discovered since Pluto.It is described as a block of ice and rock,
800 miles in diameter or more than half the size of Pluto. Being Californians, Brown and
Trujillo want to inflict the New Age name of Quaoar on their discovery. Quaoar was the god
of an Indian tribe that originally lived in the Los Angeles area and may still be stuck on
a freeway somewhere.At least they didn't try to auction off naming rights, and anyway the market for that is not real good right now. Personally, I would have preferred the astronomers had stuck with the tradition of Roman names.
The new miniplanet is currently a billion miles beyond Pluto, so they could have called it Terminus after the god of boundaries and outer limits. Since the planet is part ice, they could have given it the happy name of Comus, god of the cocktail hour. The Romans had gods for everything so there are plenty of candidates. (The god of disease was Verminus. And wouldn't that be a great combination, Verminus and Terminus?)
There is a body of thought that says Pluto should never have been declared a planet. Except for its smaller size, Quaoar has almost a better claim to be a planet than Pluto. Their "years" are similar, 248 for Pluto to orbit the Sun versus 288 for Quaoar. Unlike Pluto, it orbits on much the same plane as the other planets, and its orbit is circular, like most planets, and not elliptical like Pluto's. For part of its orbit, it's actually closer to Earth than Pluto. Either they're both planets or they're both not. Purists will say not.
Pluto and Quaoar may technically be part of a far-flung orbiting junkyard of rock and ice called the Kuiper Belt, which could contain up to 10 planetoids as big as or bigger than poor Pluto.It looks bad for clinging to the space roster as the ninth planet.
Someone has to save Pluto. Captain Video, call your spaceship. ("This may look like an ordinary rotary dial telephone but it's actually a Venusian intergalactic communicator.")
* Dale McFeatters is a columnist for Scripps Howard News Service, 1090 Vermont Ave. NW, Suite 1000, Washington, DC 20005; e-mail: mcfeattersd@shns.com.