How to Detox from Pluto's Devestating Demotion
 Pluto detoxification is the prescribed medicine for any astronomer who has lived the majority of his or her professional life believing that our Solar System has nine planets and that Pluto is one of them. Starting a Pluto cleanse is the best way to purify and detoxify the scientific mind of an artifact that no longer has astronomical value.
The difficulty of your Pluto detox depends on your relationship with the planet. For example, if you are a stellar or galactic astronomer, your Pluto cleanse might be fairly easy since the 9th planet was not a regular part of your study of the cosmos. But if you are a planetary astronomer who grow up in the 50's like me, you spent a good part of your life wondering about Pluto and what would be discovered there. Having demoted Puto to a trans-Neptunian Kuiper Belt Object doesn't sound much like the 9th rock from the Sun.
To detox safely from a life-long belief in Pluto is an especially difficult task if you happen to have known the discoverer, Clyde Tombaugh or helped him look for Planet X (the 10th planet that Clyde searched for until the end of his days.)
If you were a young man and worked at Lowell Observatory where Clyde discovered Pluto, you may find your Pluto cleanse to be even more challenging. Fraught with misconceptions and bad habits, the road to a safe detox may be daunting. Since I am that young man who studied with Tombaugh at New Mexico State and then went on to work at Lowell in Flagstaff Arizona, imagine the side-effects of my Pluto detox.
First there is simply the habit of thinking about Pluto in terms of it being an important celestial body. Then there is remembering all the hullaballoo and hub-bub about the discovery in 1930. Tombaugh's supervisor was Percival Lowell, the man for which the Flagstaff observatory is named and who built and funded not only a facility to search for the 9th planet, but who was obsessed with life on Mars.
Clyde's discovery of Pluto was a far greater credit to Lowell observatory - the story of a Kansas farm boy with little formal training discovering the most distant object orbiting the Sun. Remember, there was no space telescope at that time, and the great 200 inch scope at Palomar was not even born yet. Tombaugh used an abandoned 13" telescope and searched an area of the sky where he suspected he might find a moving object for 1 1/2 years before he noticed something moving amongst the background stars. It came to named Pluto after the Roman God of the underworld, a planet that orbited the sun every 250 years.
Suddenly, at the beginning of a new millennium the same scientific community that heaped this honor have returned to strip Pluto from its position as backfielder for the Solar System. It will be one long detox to cleanse and purify every last remaining association. I know this to be true because I have been in denial about it. After all, the IAU stated that it was a provisional finding and they passed it when most of the attendees had left the conference. The conference was not convened to decide the fate of Pluto. It was quietly put on the agenda at the end of the meeting. Yet, it was world news with protestors and non-believers like myself demonstrating on the streets.
But denial is one of the barriers to a good and full detox. And I am dedicated to a complete and safe planetary detox.
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