Setting the Record Straight on Pluto

In the era before the Internet people had to take your word for it when you were right. A couple times my kids got answers wrong in their astronomy homework because I gave them the right answer and their textbooks were wrong!

Their textbook said Mercury, the planet closest to the sun, was the hottest planet. Wrong. It’s Venus, which has that runaway greenhouse gas thing going, making the surface underneath that cloud cover incredibly hot. I could not convince the teacher he was wrong and my kids were right.

The other time had to do with which planet was furthest from the sun. The textbook said Pluto, and that’s right for around 220 years of its 242 year orbit. However, during the eighties, while my children were attending school, the wildly eccentric orbit of Pluto brought it closer to the sun than Neptune, making that planet the furthest from the sun.

Look, I don’t make this stuff up. I remembered it from the books I read as a kid.

The Solar System has changed a lot since my school days. Back then we believed every planet had its own form of life.

Venus was a hot, humid world still populated by dinosaurs. Mars was dying, inhabited by a wise, ancient race resigned to their fate, who carefully channeled the precious waters of the polar caps through canals that covered the entire planet in a life-preserving grid. The residents of Jupiter were short and squat from having to stand up under such immense gravity.

Then Mariner 2 flew by Venus in 1962 and Mariner 4 by Mars two years later and we realized there was no life there. Or anywhere. Jupiter was nothing but gas all the way to its core, and every place else was either too hot or too cold.

Then, adding insult to injury, Pluto got demoted to dwarf planet, leaving us one world short.

Things change over time. There might be life that floats high in the clouds of Venus. Mars shows every sign of having once had water and life and, who knows, maybe it’s still there. Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s moon Enceladus may have underground oceans, atmospheres and – just possibly – life!

Then there’s our old friend Pluto. It wasn’t that long ago that even the Hubble Telescope could only show a hazy dot with almost no discernable features, except possibly a light spot. That spot turned out to be a heartshaped feature. Pluto has an atmosphere, and despite being demoted by Neil degrasse Tyson (who I like otherwise), it might be the most interesting world of all – except our own, of course.

That’s because the New Horizons spacecraft, launched back in 2006 to a supposedly dead world, flew by Pluto in 2015. Instead of a rock-solid ice-ball Pluto turns out to be a geologically active world, heated by its hot core, with possibly underground oceans, and even – dare I say it? – life!

I do miss the old solar system of my youth, the tropical Venus, the dying Mars crisscrossed with canals, and Jupiter, the home of linebackers and defensive tackles. But the new Solar System is in some ways even more interesting, because it’s really happening, and we’re learning more and more all the time.

And this time around I’ll be able to defend my grandkids when they write all this in their school papers, because I bought the book “The Pluto System After New Horizons.” And if their teachers don’t believe me, I have one advantage I didn’t have back in the 80’s.

They can check the internet.