Pluto just picked up a powerful ally: the head of NASA. Testifying before a Senate panel on the 2027 NASA budget Tuesday, Administrator Jared Isaacman made clear he wants the icy world reinstated as a full-fledged planet, Space.com reports. "I am very much in the camp of 'make Pluto a planet again,'" he told Republican Sen. Jerry Moran, who noted that Pluto discoverer Clyde Tombaugh was a Kansan. Isaacman said NASA is working on papers it hopes to "escalate through the scientific community" to reopen the debate and restore Tombaugh's legacy.
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union said a planet must orbit a star, be "big enough to have enough gravity to force it into a spherical shape," and be "big enough that its gravity has cleared away any other objects of a similar size near its orbit"—criteria Pluto failed under the third point. Any reversal would be up to the IAU, not NASA, but Isaacman's stance adds weight to a long-running push that gained momentum after the New Horizons flyby in 2015 revealed Pluto as a geologically complex world with mountains, glaciers, and a heart-shaped region named for Tombaugh.
Experts remain divided on the issue, with some noting that reclassifying dwarf planets as planets could result in the solar system having far too many planets for anybody to remember all their names. Pluto is one of five recognized dwarf planets in our solar system, but the IAU estimates there could be well over a hundred.
- "While NASA administrators are free to wax nostalgic for the days when Pluto was a planet, the actual scientists working in the field will continue to try to explain and classify objects in the solar system in the way that actually helps us understand the world in which we live," Mike Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology, tells the Independent. Brown was involved in the IAU's 2006 decision.
- "Of course Pluto's a planet, but it is a dwarf planet, a subspecies of planet. The argument seems to swirl about those who wish to say whether dwarf planets are or are not planets. This is a waste of time," says Bill McKinnon, Director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. "Pluto is part of the rest of the solar system, the outer parts that are construction debris left over from building the planets. We didn't know this just 30 years ago." He adds: "Pluto is round, has an atmosphere, active geology and five (!) moons. What more does a planet need?"
- USA Today reports that Pluto's other allies include William Shatner, who slammed the IAU last year as "just a bunch of corrupt nerds on a power trip" and said President Trump should issue executive orders to restore Pluto's planet status—and name one of its moons Vulcan.
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