All of the Above: The Lowdown on the High Up

Copyright © 2005 by Joel Marks Originally published with the title “Discovery of 10th planet may mean there really are only eight” in the New Haven Register on August 3, 2005 (page A6) At first I was excited to learn that a tenth planet has just been discovered in our solar system. But a moment's reflection made me realize that this probably means there are only eight planets. How could that be? The status of the ninth planet, Pluto, has been in question ever since a new category of solar system object was discovered, which are now collectively known as the Kuiper Belt. Analogous to the ring of asteroids that orbit the Sun between Mars and Jupiter, these are tens of thousands of planetoids that orbit the Sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. That is also where Pluto spends most of its time (although Pluto's eccentric orbit sometimes brings it closer to the Sun than Neptune). So there has been the surmise that Pluto may not be a planet but simply the largest member of the Kuiper Bel...

Copyright © 2004 by Joel Marks Originally published in the Evening Division Student Newsletter of the University of New Haven, vol. 1, no. 5, June 2004 We live in the golden age of astronomy. The discoveries that are being made on a daily basis dwarf anything before in human history. Perhaps the only rival would be the prehistoric discovery of the starry sky itself, when our ancestors first looked up at night (or in the daytime too) and took note that what was above them was something wonderful. Sad to say, the current explosion of human understanding of the cosmos is matched only by the unprecedented indifference to it by contemporary humanity. And that is likely due to the simple fact that what was plainly visible to our distant, and even recent, ancestors, is no longer so to most of us urban and suburban dwellers. The starry sky has been all but eliminated by light pollution. There is ignorance of even the most basic phenomena that were known for thousands of years, such as the phas...