In the month of August in the year 2006, during the gathering of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) General Assembly, a momentous decision was made to redefine Pluto as a dwarf planet. The rationale behind this reclassification lay in the fact that Pluto failed to meet one of the three newly established criteria deemed essential for planetary status. These criteria required that a celestial body must: revolve around its parent star, akin to how Earth and Jupiter orbit the Sun; possess a substantial roundness in shape; and exert a significant gravitational influence on the orbital paths of other objects in its vicinity. Due to its failure to meet the latter criterion, Pluto, after undergoing years of contentious deliberation, was officially relegated to the classification of a dwarf planet through a majority vote at the IAU’s annual assembly held in the city of Prague that same year.
This reclassification of Pluto prompted a wave of public outrage. Notably, the astronomer Michael Brown from CalTech, whose research contributed to the reclassification, found himself inundated with angry emails from schoolchildren and even faced a barrage of offensive phone calls. In response to the controversy, Brown went on to pen a book titled “Why I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming.”
Notably, Clyde Tombaugh, the esteemed astronomer credited with the discovery of Pluto, passed away in 1997, blissfully unaware of the fact that the planet he had unearthed had been stripped of its planetary status.
This informative article was originally published in USA TODAY, shedding light on the momentous occasion when Pluto was stripped of its planetary designation.
