by Michael Sims 

You saw the headlines: PLUTO THROWN OUT OF SOLAR SYSTEM SCIENTISTS DEMOTE PLUTO ONLY EIGHT PLANETS?

On Aug. 24, the International Astronomical Union (IAU)—including one Nashvillian— convened in Prague. Among other things, they revised the definition of “planet.” In doing so, the 400-odd voting astronomers and space scientists officially demoted Pluto, which had been considered the ninth and outermost planet of the solar system ever since its discovery in 1930, to the status of “dwarf planet.”

Amazingly, many thousands of people around the world were paying attention—and cared. They were outraged and they weren’t going to sit still and let a bunch of eggheads rearrange their familiar cosmos. (Never mind that most people passionate about this issue can’t even point out the North Star.) Some demanded that Pluto be grandfathered into the new system, granted amnesty despite its suddenly illegal status. More than one wag suggested that Mickey Mouse’s dog be demoted, as well.

Various word watchers, and even some online dictionaries, are already defining the word plutoed as “demoted, downgraded, or dumped”—as in “Damn, man, she like totally plutoed me.” In New Mexico, Democratic Rep. Joni Marie Gutierrez has actually talked the state legislature, which clearly has nothing pressing to do with its time, into voting on a proposition declaring that, “as Pluto passes overhead through New Mexico’s excellent night skies, it be declared a planet.” All sorts of petitions have appeared online, with many of the signatures followed by insightful commentary such as this: “Pluto is AWESOME!!!! You WILL ALWAYS BE A PLANET!!!!!!!!” However comforting Pluto may have found this cheerleading, scientists have not been swayed.

The outpouring of emotion seemed at times to be that rare sight in millennial America—compassion for the underdog. Pluto is the tiniest planet, smaller than our moon. It’s a quirky little nonconformist with a skewed orbit that, from our comfy post on the third rock from the sun, seems way the hell out in the middle of nowhere. It isn’t even round; it’s lumpy and dented. It lacks Mars’ glamour, Jupiter’s bulk, Saturn’s bling.

Many people seemed to think that the new definition was about size, that Pluto had been rejected as merely a runt. It was as if Congress had told Rhode Island that it was a perfectly nice little place but certainly not qualified to be called a state alongside Utah and Alaska. But the definition was not only about size. Here is how the IAU expressed it after the meeting: A planet is now defined as a body that (a) orbits the sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its own gravity to keep it round and (c) has “cleared the neighborhood around its orbit” of other, smaller astronomical bodies.

Many scientists argued about the new definition, too. Was it necessary? After all, it will cause a whole lot of revising in the scientific community. As Tennessee State University astrobiologist Todd Gary asks rhetorically, “How often does every science textbook in America become obsolete in a single day?”

Gary isn’t the only Nashvillian interested in the flap about Pluto. Even in a town where Metro Council members recently voted English the official language, some people are paying attention to the larger cosmos out there beyond our dinky little boondocks planet. TSU astronomer Frank Fekel was actually in Prague last summer, debating Pluto’s characteristics and participating in the vote. “I voted to kick Pluto out,” he says. TSU also boasts astronomy professor Greg Henry, who was actually the first scientist to detect a planet outside our solar system. (Perhaps you’ve seen the billboard on Briley Parkway: “TSU has discovered two new planets. Have you discovered TSU?”)

Vanderbilt astronomer David Weintraub says the Prague conference produced “vagueness and confusion,” and he declares flatly, “This debate will continue.” He ought to know. He wrote the book on Pluto.

It’s a big universe. Prague seems a long way from here, and Pluto, to most people, is as mythical as Narnia. But many Nashvillians have been involved with Pluto’s identity crisis, as well as with other issues about astronomy, space science and the big picture view of Earth’s place in the larger context. Despite the claims of Christian fundamentalists that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago and dinosaurs were weeping as the Ark sailed away, forward-thinking educators know that few issues in America are more urgent than introducing young people to the sciences.

Somebody has to be trained to participate in (rather than become a victim of) the new century of genetic engineering and nanotechnology and space travel, the world of global warming and cloning. But science education is about more than training future scientists; it’s also about training sensible citizens, people who know the difference between knowledge and faith and who can recognize when genuine science is under attack by demagogues. Responsible voting—the basis of that idealistic state called a democracy—means informed voting. Hot-button demagogues are rampant here in God’s country, but knowledge offers power to fight them.

Science education also goes far beyond knowing enough to refute the spin doctors. Think of the first questions that most human beings ask until society tells them that curiosity isn’t cool: What is that thing? How does it work? Where did it come from? Why is the sky blue? What makes the wind blow? Science is the one human endeavor that tries to answer these questions. Scientists from Darwin to Jane Goodall have insisted that their passion for understanding grew out of childhood curiosity, and that science kept it alive and gave it a framework. What better way to keep the pilot light going in young minds than to feed it with knowledge and mystery?

Here in the Jetsons’ century, science is keeping young minds awake all around Nashville. For starters, Fisk and Vanderbilt co-sponsor the Astronomy Road Show, a mobile planetarium that visits schools in the region to introduce students to a hands-on experience of space science. And the renovation currently underway at the Adventure Science Center will turn the Sudekum Planetarium into one of the largest space domes in the nation. The very name of the planned extension there draws the mind’s eye upward and outward: the Sky and Space Wing.

As director of the Communication of Science and Technology program at Vanderbilt University—a major he helped create five years ago—astronomer David Weintraub works with such exciting subjects every day. He mentors Ph.D. candidates in both astronomy and physics, but unlike many tenured professors, he also spends a great deal of time with undergraduates, directing the physics program and advising numerous students.

After 14 years of teaching an introductory course on the astronomy of the solar system, Weintraub still begins each semester by asking students to try to think like astronomers, to ask questions that can be addressed and researched during the course work. “Over the years,” he says, “some new questions emerge while others fade into the past, but without fail my students ask, ‘Is Pluto a planet?’ ”

Weintraub insists that this question is “undoubtedly one of the very best and most exciting” in contemporary astronomy, and it led to the title of his recent book from Princeton University Press, Is Pluto a Planet? A Historical Journey Through the Solar System, a lucid, straightforward and surprisingly entertaining volume. No, he didn’t dash it off after the decision of the committee in Prague. The book evolved from years of classes and was already turned in and scheduled for publication. Some authors just have good timing.

Bearded, balding, in his late 40s, Weintraub wouldn’t be cast in a Hollywood movie as an astronomer; he doesn’t look geeky enough and wasn’t exactly a science nerd as a child. When Weintraub was about 8, his uncle gave him and his brother a small telescope. “I recall the exact spot in our yard where we set it up and pointed it at the moon. And I remember saying, ‘OK, it doesn’t do anything; this is boring,’ and we never used it again.” He joined Boy Scouts at age 11. He quickly passed his Tenderfoot and Second Class Scout requirements, as well as all the requirements for First Class Scout—except for identifying the five or six constellations demanded by the Scout manual.

Instead, Weintraub liked science fiction, especially stories with a theological slant such as Arthur C. Clarke’s classic tale, “The Nine Billion Names of God.” In junior high, he was also drawn to Barrie Stavis’ famous play about Galileo, Lamp at Midnight. As an example of how childhood interests provoke adult responses, Weintraub has since taught a course on the trial of Galileo that he refers to as “the tangled web of astronomy and religion.”

But Weintraub also understands—from disappointing personal experience—why so many people are turned off by science courses. “As a senior in high school,” he recalls, “I took my first-ever college course in the fall term at Penn State University, where my father was a professor.” The course was an introduction to astronomy. “It was by a long shot the worst course and worst educational experience I have ever had because the professor was so bad.” Subsequent classroom experiences were hardly better. “All the courses I took were uniformly awful, though I learned much.” Vowing to do better by his own students, Weintraub, with his Vanderbilt colleague Robert Knop, is trying to reinvent the university’s introductory astronomy courses for non-majors.

One acclaimed program for encouraging students to study Pluto, the other planets and the stars beyond is the Minority Institution Astrobiology Collaboratory (MIAC). A collaboration between faculty and staff and students at eight traditionally minority colleges and universities, including TSU, it was founded after the Astrobiology Science Conference held at NASA’s Ames Space Center in 2002. There were more than 800 attendees at the conference, but less than one percent were black.

An astrobiologist studies both the life we may find in space and the life we may take there—the ways in which human beings will have to live to survive on other planets. The MIAC’s mandate is to develop astrobiology courses and outreach programs designed to attract larger numbers of minority students. This goal also involves improving education and research opportunities for both faculty and students, as well as creating a forum for student work and publications in the field. In addition to TSU, participating institutions include North Carolina Central University, South Carolina State University, Houston Community College, Norfolk State University, Benedict College in South Carolina and Bennett College in North Carolina. One of the co-directors is TSU astrobiologist Todd Gary.

LaTasha Taylor, one of the most distinguished graduates to emerge from the MIAC program, has already jumped from TSU to Mars. Well, she spent several weeks living in the Mars Desert Research Station, but actually it’s on Earth. The view from her window looked like the barren red sands of Mars, but she was actually in the Utah desert in a self-contained habitat, a simulated planetary research station established by NASA and a nonprofit organization called the Mars Society. During the winter she and her colleagues—space scientists and students from around the country—wore spacesuits when exploring the harsh climate outside the ship. The rest of the time they were crowded like submariners into a two-story cylindrical artificial habitat.

Taylor was also the first MIAC student chosen to participate in an international astrobiology internship. In 2003, she worked at the Centro De Astrobiologia in Madrid, Spain. She worked in the Planetary Exploration and Robotics lab, assisting in the design of components for the Mars Analog Research and Technology Experiment. Like other scientists and students in this program, Taylor has visited many schools, especially in Middle Tennessee, and spoken about her experiences and about the opportunities in this field. Because interest in planetary research has been stirred up again over the last few years by everything from NASA reports of Saturn flybys to the movie Mars Attacks!, the recent hullabaloo about Pluto has provided a fresh starting point for discussions about planetary research.

“Shortly after my introduction to this new and exciting field, in the form of a research opportunity funded by NASA, I began my journey in ‘astrobiotechnology’—applying technology to the questions of astrobiology,” Taylor says. In other words, she’s working to bridge the gap between scientific knowledge and its technological applications. Taylor is currently a graduate student in the Science and Technical Communication Department at the University of Washington. Her research focuses on designing and developing tools that employ the principles of what computer science courses are calling “usability engineering.” This discipline, which is now offered as part of many computer science majors, involves the quite new study of the interaction of human beings and computers, so that software may evolve toward a friendlier and more collaborative relationship with its users. What Taylor is learning will eventually ease the transition from robotic rovers to human exploration.

With a return to the moon and a first staffed expedition to Mars on the drawing boards at space agencies around the world, Taylor is in the vanguard of a new generation of explorers. And she points out in her frequent talks to students, “My fascination with astrobiology began during my sophomore year as an undergraduate student at Tennessee State University.”

Captain Kirk may be wrong about space being the final frontier. The final frontier may turn out to be time or death or genetic engineering. But space is unquestionably the next frontier. Human beings have barely dipped their toes in the galactic ocean and whispered, “Wow.” The few journeys we have made into our celestial neighborhood have yet to reach the level of a Lewis and Clark expedition. The next big step in history will be the voyage to other planets, which will demand international teamwork and all kinds of scientific and technological interaction.

Therefore, back home on Earth, many people are working to educate the next round of LaTasha Taylors.

Judy Butler has built a whole career around communicating science to young people, even before she thought of it that way. She trained as a speech therapist, attempting to use science to improve the sometimes troubled journey between ear and tongue. For 12 years she was coordinator of student teaching in the Special Education Department at Vanderbilt’s Peabody College. She has taught at elementary, middle and high schools and spent 11 years as the coordinator of gifted education in Williamson County schools before becoming the director of curriculum there.

When Butler retired from the school system in 2002, she thought she would relax, do a few teacher workshops, catch up on her hobbies. Naturally, none of this occurred. Instead, TSU astrobiologist Todd Gary issued an invitation: “Why don’t you just come to work for TSU and help us do science education outreach?” So she did. That year she formed her own company, Dragonfly Enterprises, an educational consulting firm. For the last five years, she has contracted with TSU to help write grants, evaluate programs and initiate new projects. “What I try to do is to take what the scientists are doing at TSU—which is pretty exciting—and figure out ways to connect that really great science to children.”

This goal requires a lot of time spent writing grant proposals, and the program has received, among others, a grant from SEMAA, the Science Engineering Mathematics Aerospace Academy, which is funded by NASA and sponsors science academies for students. The Saturday academies—usually referred to as Space Camp—lure Nashville kids into programs with a focus on futuristic outer space, such as recent workshops about the planets in general and Pluto in particular. If such workshops sound like something for only hopeless nerds, it’s worth mentioning that the program’s website, semaanashville.com, has recorded more than 350,000 hits since its inception three years ago.

Butler also works to establish relationships with Metro schools so that the SEMAA curricula and other programs can be worked into regular school day classes, after school programs and summer workshops. The SEMAA program was founded in Cleveland in 1993, largely by former Ohio Congressman Louis Stokes, the state’s first black congressman and an influential advocate for science education. It focuses on K–12 classes and has proven particularly effective in raising interest—and grades—among minority youth; in a recent statistical survey, 44 percent of participants were at or below the national poverty level.

“In our SEMAA program,” explains Butler, “the focus is really on underrepresented children in science—girls, minority children, children from lower socioeconomic settings who wouldn’t be able to pay the fee to go to Space Camp.” In an effort to reach as many students as possible, Todd Gary and others went to the YMCA’s Hispanic Achievers program to have their science presentations translated into Spanish. TSU provided two large classrooms on the campus for science programs such as a recent robotics workshop.

TSU’s strong international presence in astronomy involves a number of different people, of course. Astronomer Frank Fekel has drawn considerable national attention. Now a professor in the Center of Excellence in Information Systems and Center for Automated Astronomy at TSU, he received his Ph.D. in astronomy in 1979 and taught at NASA’S Marshall Space Flight Center and then at Vanderbilt before spending the last 11 years at TSU. His primary research interest lies in the stars in the immediate neighborhood of the solar system, especially those similar to Earth’s own sun. He treks to TSU’s telescope arrays in Arizona to research binary and multiple star systems (those with more than one sun in the same system, a surprisingly common scenario out in space).

In 1999, a team of astronomers led by Greg Henry of TSU and Geoff Marcy of University of California, Berkeley announced that they had observed the shadow of a planet crossing a distant star. A slight wobble in the motion of a little known star called HD 209458, which resembles Earth’s sun but is 150 light years away, had led astronomers to suspect that planets were orbiting it. Henry achieved worldwide fame by becoming the first astronomer to report actual visual confirmation of the existence of a planet in another solar system. “It’s beginning to get interesting,” Henry remarked of planetary science at the time. Since then, he has helped make it even more interesting by discovering the first solid core planet, orbiting the sunlike star HD 149026. Interestingly, modeling of the planet structure shows that it has a solid core that is about 70 times the mass of Earth. How important is this discovery? As Bun’ei Sato, a Japanese astronomer, remarked, “None of our models predicted that nature could make a planet like the one we are studying.”

Over the last decade, there have been many analyses of stars’ light by spectrometers (an instrument that measures energy, mass, wavelengths of light and so on), and scientists have long speculated about the existence of planets in other solar systems. But Greg Henry’s work at TSU was actual evidence. There are planets circling distant suns out there, and some of those planets may very well be similar to Earth in size and climate. As Carl Sagan and many other scientists have argued for decades, it seems highly unlikely that life evolved nowhere else in the cosmos than on this little planet. Many astronomers can’t look up into the night sky without wondering whether other species are looking back at them. With Greg Henry’s discovery, planetary science was given a huge boost in popular appeal, and the popular response to the Pluto story indicates that it is still going strong.

Why are the planets so important to ordinary people? Why do we care so much about their role, their uniqueness, their history, their future?

The stars are so far away, says Vanderbilt professor Rick Chappell, but a sense of the planets provides more of a “neighborhood feeling” about the cosmos. The widespread emotional reaction to the change in Pluto’s status may prove his point. Knowledge of the planets also connects us to other stars out there, because astronomers have now found between 200 and 300 planets beyond the solar system.

Chappell is living proof of the value of early inspiration in shaping a career in science. In 1963, when President John F. Kennedy came to Vanderbilt, Chappell was an undergraduate there. He was sitting among 33,000 other people at Dudley Field when Kennedy spoke about his vision of a trip to the moon. “It changed my life,” Chappell says simply. “I went on to study space science.”

In this concise sentence Chappell omits a great deal. He trained as a space shuttle astronaut and wound up as chief scientist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center near Huntsville, Ala. He is now research professor of physics at Vanderbilt and director of Dyer Observatory. Of the strong education program he has helped create at Dyer, he says, “I like that over the years this place of observation has turned into a place of outreach.”

Dyer Observatory sits atop a small mountain off Granny White Pike, near Radnor Lake. Since it was built in 1953, on nine acres of land, it has been the site of astronomical work by many astronomers from Vanderbilt and elsewhere. Over the last decade or so, it has also become a center for science education. It hosts field trips, kids’ nights, teacher workshops, summer camps, classroom videoconferencing with Dyer astronomers, and it helps operate the Fisk-Vanderbilt Astronomy Road Show’s mobile planetarium.

Like his Vanderbilt colleague David Weintraub, Chappell is passionate about science education. He was co-author, with former Today Show host Jim Hartz, of the 1998 book Worlds Apart: How the Distance Between Science and Journalism Threatens America’s Future. Chappell’s colleagues describe him as a “tireless communicator” about science. He likes to talk about “explorers,” people who want to know more, who try to decipher the world’s mysteries: “Explorers ask questions, want to contribute to the world, want to understand or improve or create.” He includes many kinds of people in his definition, all sorts of restless minds in medicine and biology and astronomy, as well as in music and the visual arts. “There are thousands of explorers just in Nashville,” Chappell insists, “at Fisk, Belmont, TSU, Vanderbilt—everywhere.… People have no idea.”

According to Chappell, few responsibilities in science are more important than for scientists and science teachers and astronauts and others to communicate to children how they themselves felt as kids. Planetary science seems an impossibly long way from daily life in the less advantaged corners of the planet. An 11-year-old from a working-class family needs to hear from a scientist’s own lips that she too came from a working-class background, that she dared to imagine a future so different from her upbringing it seemed for a long time to be only a fantasy.

Rick Chappell is right; the stars are too far away. The stars that glimmer over Nashville watched silently as bands of Neanderthals herded woolly mammoths into pits, just as they watched silently last night above Wal-Mart parking lots and Baghdad bomb sites. Beyond our opaque ceilings, exiled above the game shows and cop dramas, they glimmer in the night sky, humbling us with their distance and taunting us with our insignificance. In contrast, the planets are our neighborhood, our community. No matter how we define Pluto, it’s still on the edge of our own turf, close enough to have an identity. And Mars seems just around the corner. To Nashville astronomers and school kids, the planets call to us to come and explore. We will. It’s what humankind does: we’re the explorer species. Earth was where we were born, but we can’t stay in the cradle forever.