The Pluto Files: The Rise and Fall of America's Favorite Planet (20 page)

1.
New York City’s Hayden Planetarium, dedicated in October 1935, followed that of the Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh and the Griffith Observatory and Planetarium in Los Angeles.

2.
NASA interview, January 2006; www.NASA.gov/multimedia/podcasting.

3.
A unit of distance in astronomy equal to 3.26 light-years, itself equal to about 19 trillion miles and derived from the distance a star would have to be for it to exhibit a parallax angle of 1 second of arc (hence par-sec) against the background stars as Earth orbits from one side of the Sun to the other.

4.
Dave Smith,
Disney A to Z—The Updated Official Encyclopedia
(New York: Hyperion Press, 1998).

5.
Dave Smith, Chief Archivist, Walt Disney Archives, private communication via Richard Vosburgh.

6.
New Oxford American Dictionary
, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).

7.
Americans eat approximately 3 billion pizzas per year, 100 acres of pizza each day, or about 350 slices per second. Mama deLucas,
All About Pizza
, © 2007; http://www.mamadelucaspizza.com/pizza.

8.
William Hershel, “Account of a Comet,”
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London
71 (1781): 492.

9.
Quoted in
The Herschel Chronicle
, edited by Constance A. Lubbock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1933), p. 86.

10.
A. J. Dressler and C. T. Russell, “The Pending Disappearance of Pluto,”
EOS
61, no. 44 (1980): 690.

11.
Quoted in Michael Lemonick,
The Georgian Star: How William and Caroline Herschel Revolutionized Our Understanding of the Cosmos
(New York: Atlas/Norton, 2008), p. 144.

12.
J. Christy, “1978 P 1,”
IAU Central Bureau of Astronomical Telegrams
, Circular No. 3241, July 7, 1978.

13.
R. P. Binzel, D. J. Tholen, E. F. Tedesco, B. J. Buratti, and R. M. Nelson, “The Detection of Eclipses in the Pluto-Charon System,
” Science
228, no. 4704 (1985): 1193–1195.

14.
Steven Soter, “What Is a Planet?”
Astronomical Journal
132 (2006): 2513–2519.

15.
International Astronomical Union, IAU Circular No. 8723, June 21, 2006.

16.
Neil deGrasse Tyson,
Merlin’s Tour of the Universe: A Skywatcher’s Guide to Everything from Mars and Quasars to Comets, Planets, Blue Moons, and Werewolves
(New York: Main Street Books, 1997), p. 62.

17.
In the official labeling scheme for newly discovered objects in the solar system, before they are formally named, the first four numerals (1992) are the year of discovery. The first letter (Q) references the semimonth of discovery. Omitting the I and Z, 24 letters remain to span each semimonth of the calendar year. The next letter (B) corresponds to the numerical sequence in which the object was discovered during that half month. Omitting I, this scheme allows up to 25 objects to be discovered in any half month. But if more than that are discovered—a common occurrence these days—then a numeral is appended (1) and the letters repeat. So, in fact, 1992 QB1 was the 27th object discovered in the first half of September in the year 1992.

18.
Clyde Tombaugh, “The Last Word,” Letters to the Editor,
Sky & Telescope
, December 1994, p 8.

19.
“Demoted Planet,”
Time
, February 20, 1956; http://www.time.com/time/archive/preview/0,10987,808181,00.html?internalid=related3.

20.
Neil deGrasse Tyson, “Pluto’s Honor,” in
Natural History
108, no. 1 (February 1999): 82.

21.
International Astronomical Union, Press Release 01/99 from the General Secretary, February 3, 1999.

22.
CIA Factbook
; http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook.

23.
Kenneth Chang,
New York Times
, January 22, 2001, pp. A1, B4.

24.
Kenneth Chang,
New York Times
, February 13, 2001, p. F2.

25.
Eric Metaxas Op-Ed,
New York Times
, February 16, 2001, p. A19.

26.
Spacewatch
; http://spacewatch.lpl.arizona.edu/2000wr106.html.

27.
By international agreement, trans-Neptunian objects are named after creation deities. Quaoar comes from the Native American Tongva people, who are local to the Los Angeles area that includes Caltech, the home institution of its discovery.

28.
Editorial,
New York Times
, October 15, 2002, p. A26.

29.
All quotes from CCNet used with permission from Benny J. Peiser.

30.
Professional astronomers today, including planetary astronomers, are basically astrophysicists. We all have extensive training in mathematics and physics and seek to understand the operations of nature as expressed by the laws of physics. So in modern times, the terms
astronomer
and
astrophysicist
are interchangeable, but with
astronomer
carrying a historical link to the days when all we could do was tell you where something was in the sky and what it looked like through a telescope.

31.
The two nearest systems to our Milky Way galaxy are the large and small Magellanic Clouds. Visible principally from the Southern Hemisphere, the explorer Magellan, during his round-the-world journey, thought they were clouds. But telescopes later revealed them to be “dwarf” satellite galaxies in orbit around the Milky Way.

32.
Exoplanets are planets that orbit stars other than the Sun (compare with exobiology). They’re sometimes clumsily called extrasolar planets.

33.
Steven Soter, “What Is a Planet?”
Astronomical Journal
132 (2006): 2513. Also see “What Is a Planet?”
Scientific American
296, no. 1 (January 2007): 20–27.

34.
Petition Protesting the IAU Planet Definition; http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/planet protest.

35.
“IAU Geographical Distributions of Individual Members”; http://193.49.4.189/Geographical_Distribution.8.0.html.

36.
Jonathan Coulton, “I’m Your Moon,” 2006; http://www.jonathancoulton.com/songdetails/I’m%Your%Moon.

37.
Jeff Mondak and Alex Stangl, “Pluto’s Not a Planet Anymore”; http://jeffspoemsforkids.com.

38.
“Despite Planetary Downgrade, Pluto Is Still Disney’s ‘Dog Star,’” PR Newswire, August 24, 2006; http://www.prnewswire.com.

39.
California Institute of Technology, “Funeral for a Planet”; http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/LXIX4/funeral.html.

40.
Brian O’Neill, “We See It as an Opportunity, Pluto,”
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
, August 17, 2006; http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06229/714139–155.stm.

41.
Mark Newman, “Pluto Sent Down to the Minors”; http://MLB.com/news.

42.
Dan Shaughnessy, “This Is One Star That Is in A Wobbly Orbit,”
Boston Globe
, August 27, 2006.

43.
Andy Borowitz, “Scientists Say Knicks Are No Longer a Basketball Team”; http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6582.

44.
Andy Borowitz, “Scientists Demote Bush Presidency to Dwarf Status”; http://www.borowitzreport.com/archive_rpt.asp?rec=6632&srch=.

45.
“NASA Launches Probe to Inform Pluto of Demotion”
The Onion
, no. 42.51, December 18, 2006.

46.
News account reported by
Machinist
; http://machinist.salon.com/blog/2008/02/27/11_planet/index.html.

47.
David Aguilar,
11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System
(Washington, DC: National Geographic Children’s Books, 2008).

48.
American Dialect Society, “Plutoed”; http://www.americandialect.org/Word-of-the-Year_2006.pdf.

49.
IAU press release IAU0804, July 11 2008; http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/release/iau0804/.

50.
“Great Planet Debate: Science as Process,” Mark V. Sykes and Neil deGrasse Tyson, moderated by Ira Flatow, John Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, August 14, 2008; http://gpd.jhuapl.edu/

51.
US Naval Observatory; http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/; and Kenneth R. Lang,
Astrophysical Formulae,
vols. 1 and 2 (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1999).

52.
The eight “planets” are Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

53.
An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects as dwarf planet or other categories.

54.
These currently include most of the solar system asteroids, most trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.