‘Make Pluto a planet again’? NASA chief revives debate that divides astronomers
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Will Pluto become a planet again?Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute
Many of us are old enough to have grown up with nine planets orbiting the Sun. In 2006, however, a controversial decision within the astronomy community resulted in the official list being cut to eight, removing Pluto.
On Tuesday, responding to a question during a testimony to a US Senate committee, NASA administrator Jared Isaacman said he was firmly on the side of restoring Pluto’s lost planetary status, and that the agency was “working on some papers right now to escalate through the scientific community to revisit this”. It is unclear what papers Isaacman was referring to; NASA did not respond to a request for clarification.
Isaacman’s remark triggered debate among researchers with some backing the proposal and others being forcefully against it. “The question of whether or not we should call Pluto a planet distracts from the real scientific issues,” says Amanda Hendrix, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
What has riled some astronomers was that Isaacman’s remark came at the end of a testimony in which he endorsed the United States Administration’s proposal to halve NASA’s science budget. Together with cuts at the National Science Foundation, many astronomers feel that their field is under siege. “It's wild to ‘make Pluto a planet again’ while decimating the careers of those of us that study it,” planetary scientist Adeene Denton wrote on BlueSky.
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