Why Pluto is the planet (yes, we said ‘planet’) we need right now

Hundreds of people who love the little planet that was dissed, gather every year in the Arizona town where Pluto was discovered. They celebrate scientific discovery, history and our solar system’s underdog.

Flagstaff, Arizona (CNN) — For no explainable practical reason, humans are enamored with – and even empathetic toward – specific inanimate objects. Our first car. A choice coffee mug. And for a particular subset of the population, that extends to a dimly lit frozen sphere currently 3.3 billion miles away.

Several hundred of them pilgrimage to Arizona each February for the I Heart Pluto Festival. Flagstaff is the site where, nearly a century ago, a telescope lens picked out what was hailed for decades as the ninth planet of our solar system.

Today, schoolchildren are taught that adding Pluto to the roster was a mistake — that there are only eight proper planets after all, and that Pluto belongs to the also-ran class of “dwarf planets.”

But that demotion doesn’t stop the faithful from showing up for several days of lectures, pub crawling and birthday cake.

“It’s about the love affair. It’s about this subculture of people who love it so much that you guys have a festival,” said Alan Stern, to about 200 people on a night of Pluto-related talks at Flagstaff’s Orpheum Theater, on Valentine’s Day. Stern is the Principal Investigator of New Horizons, a still-active spacecraft mission that flew by and took close-up imagery of Pluto in 2015 — revealing, contrary to artists’ conceptions of a generic meteor-battered moonlike sphere, that the surface featured massive glaciers and a vast heart-shaped region, bright with frozen nitrogen.

There is no such thing as an I Heart Jupiter — or any other planet — Festival, Stern reminded the crowd.

Pluto also stirs proprietary feelings because it held the distinction, among the once-official roster of nine planets, of being the only member discovered from the US. The five planets closest to Earth — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — are all visible to the naked eye, so they were known to ancient stargazers. Astronomers discovered Uranus from England in 1781 and Neptune from Germany 65 years later, and both of those are scientifically “unloved,” as measured by the lack of dedicated space missions sent to explore them.

Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory made international headlines in February of 1930 when astronomer Clyde Tombaugh spotted the distant “Planet 9” from a telescope that stands on the grounds today. Pluto was such a cultural phenomenon at the time, Walt Disney named Mickey’s only pet after it in 1931. It then settled in for generations as the punctuation at the end of the roll call of the planets, the rocky little oddball out beyond the gas giants that completed the set.

But in 2006, Pluto was in the headlines again, as the Paris-based International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefined “planet” in a such a way that it was excluded from the official canon.

This demotion remains a source of grief and camaraderie for the fanatical. When Stoker Stoker, the observatory’s Dark Sky Planetarium Specialist, mentioned Pluto’s reclassification in their remarks to the crowd at the Orpheum, a cry of “Bullshit!” rang out in the cavernous space, followed by laughter. Stoker quickly added, “– which we don’t like very much here in Flagstaff.”

The recalcitrant, or perhaps just nostalgic, can purchase a pro-Pluto mug at the observatory’s gift shop which reads “Back in my day we had nine planets.” If you want to get technical about it – and attendees of the festival do – our sun is a dwarf sun, but nobody goes around telling people it doesn’t count as a star.

Pluto for the people

Heading to the I Heart Pluto Festival, I anticipated a gathering of quirky contrarians focused on the weird and whimsical. But instead of oddballs I found eggheads, in the coolest sense: people drawn together for an earnest celebration of local pride, scientific discovery and American history.

That said, there is a sort of Pluto gang sign, if you want to show your colors. Hold up two hands and fold back one thumb to demonstrate your allegiance to number 9.

“Humans are a little bit funny,” Stoker told the crowd. “Despite our abnormally large brains, we tend to listen to our hearts. And we’re contrary, we have a very strong sense of fairness … we love an underdog. So, it’s not a surprise to me that when it seemed like Pluto was being slighted by some of the scientific community … people who loved these things cried out. It’s a very human thing, wanting to celebrate the legacy of Pluto.”

Eddie Gonzales, 46, who sells satellite equipment from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was wearing a red baseball cap with a familiar font that read: “PLUTO AMERICAS PLANET AGAIN.” He had come to the festival in the hopes of giving away – to some more official entity – one of several domain names he’d bought, all honoring Pluto’s discovery. His clydetombaugh.com, for example, contains biographical information of the astronomer; another, papa2026.com, decries Pluto’s loss of standing as the work of “an unelected international committee” and exhorts visitors to “join our campaign to make Pluto America’s Planet Again.”

Arizona is a state known for its defiance (see its record on adopting Daylight Saving Time), and in 2024, the legislature declared Pluto the state planet, nearly two decades after the IAU determined it wasn’t eligible for planethood. Justin Wilmeth, the state representative who proudly introduced the bill and got it passed, wore a purple T-shirt with a travel poster image of a downhill astronaut labeled “Ski Pluto” as he addressed attendees.

But the festival’s pro-Pluto stance is not as rogue as it sounds. The scientific community is also a bit defiant on the subject of Pluto’s status. Stern told me that a scientist at the University of Central Florida did an analysis of 18,000 published papers on planetary science in the 15 or so years after 2006 (the year the IAU stripped Pluto of its title), and found none used the IAU’s “laughingstock” of a planet definition of “dwarf planet.”

A trio of friends in their 70s – Ilene Hart, Sharon Halfnight and Rich Lyon, the latter two from Canada – talked over one another in their excitement at the event’s Plutonian pageantry. Halfnight, an astrology enthusiast, pointed out that the roughly 250 years it takes Pluto to orbit the sun means it has basically returned today to where it was when America was fighting for independence, a portent of revolution to come. After all, Halfnight added, Pluto and “plutocracy” (rule by the rich) share a root word, which should be a reminder to all of us about the potential for misuse of power.

Hart, meanwhile, was hopeful that “young hippies” — like those found in the many coffee shops and breweries of Flagstaff – would stand up to the bureaucracy that stole Pluto’s identity.

Lyon said that he lives in a dark sky area called Cortes Island, about 180 miles north of Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. In Flagstaff, he was likewise in touch with the visible cosmos; the anti-light-pollution group DarkSky International made it the first place certified as an International Dark Sky City in 2001.

The darkness is a point of civic pride. Private homes and the city participate in the effort, which is why the streets at night are lit in the orange glow of special LED streetlights. To capitalize on the initiative, there’s an open-air planetarium on the roof of Lowell Observatory from which visitors marvel at the night sky from heated, reclined seats.

The night before the talks at the Orpheum, there was a Pluto-themed pub crawl featuring interstellar-themed cocktails and beers, and the day after Valentine’s Day featured a series of science presentations at the observatory. The festival concluded with more than 500 Plutophiles attending a birthday bash where “Happy Birthday” was sung around a cake featuring Pluie, a stalk-eyed alien cartoon mascot. Visitors could also climb a set of stairs into the original hilltop observatory tower still housing the telescope Clynbaugh used to find Pluto.

All-American obsolescence

To love Pluto is to also love Flagstaff – a charming town of old brick buildings and cozy gathering spaces, full of college kids and old hippies, surrounded by mountain peaks and outdoor recreation. And it’s the gateway to the Grand Canyon.

The city is bisected by another once-celebrated, now-downgraded emblem of American progress and accomplishment: the roadway currently known as “Historic Route 66.” As regular Route 66, it was the backbone of the federal highway system, running from Chicago to Los Angeles; in “The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck called it the “Mother Road.” Supplanted by the Interstate Highway System, it was officially decommissioned in 1985.

One of the speakers at the festival, the spoken word poet Christopher Fox Graham, tied the town, road and planet together in a poem titled “Per Aspera Ad Astra,” Latin for “To the stars through difficulties.” He read, in part:

Personally, I learned to love Flagstaff as a remedy for difficulties. Thirty years ago, just out of college and working at a middle school in Phoenix for Teach for America, I would relieve the stress of my job by driving 150 miles up to Flagstaff on weekends to ski and make fast, fleeting friendships at local bars.

On my first visit to the Lowell Observatory back then, the staff earnestly helped me come up with a romantic gesture for my girlfriend back on the East Coast. I wanted to find a nightly shared point of reference to bridge the distance, and three excited employees debated whether it should be love-themed Venus or Sirius, the Dog Star. We chose the latter because it’s the brightest star in the night sky, an object of navigation and a symbol of devotion that sits by Orion, his loyal companion.

Pluto, I’d never given much thought to. I shed no tears when it was unceremoniously stripped of its title. Science was science, wasn’t it? Before heading out of town on this visit, I made a final stop at the Mother Road Brewing Company. Given that it was packed on a Sunday night I assumed I was surrounded by diehard Pluto fans.

Drinking a double IPA called Ad Astra, dedicated to the little planet that could, I searched my feelings anew. The cold, tiny world didn’t have enough mass to clear its orbit, but it had drawn all these people with the gravitational force of what it represents: Science. Exploration. Ingenuity. Injustice. Revolution. Viva la Pluto!

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