Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited
by Andrey Bulkin
[REGNUM] The United States is seriously planning to restore Pluto's planetary status, which it lost in 2006 by a decision of the International Astronomical Union.
This is not the first time that proposals have been made to "rehabilitate" Pluto, but this time the initiative was put forward by Jack Isaacman, the head of NASA, one of the world's leading space agencies.
SPACE AS A CURE FOR DEPRESSION
On April 28, Isaacman testified in the U.S. Senate at a hearing on the space agency's 2027 budget. During the discussion, Republican Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas took the floor and asked the NASA administrator's opinion on Pluto's status.
"Senator, I am a strong advocate of making Pluto a planet again, " Isaacman replied.
To understand why Pluto's status is so significant for the United States, it's important to remember the story of its discovery in 1930. The United States was experiencing the Great Depression at the time, and officials and newspapers were looking for some positive news amid the bleak news of the crisis.
It was at this moment that 24-year-old Clyde Tombaugh, a farm boy from Kansas, discovered a new planet. This was a truly unique event—almost all the planets in the Solar System had been known since ancient times, and the last new planet at that time, Neptune, had been discovered in Europe almost a century earlier, in 1846.
The story of this discovery reads like a movie script. Tombaugh had no formal training in astronomy, as his family couldn't afford university, but he was passionate about the science. He built his own telescopes and sketched the night sky.
After sending his drawings to several observatories, he unexpectedly received not criticism but recognition, and eventually, a job offer from the director of the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. At the time, they had just resumed the search for the mysterious "Planet X," which the observatory's late founder, Percival Lowell, had unsuccessfully sought to explain the orbital irregularities of Uranus and Neptune.
As Kevin Schindler, a representative of the observatory, told Space.com, Lowell's hypothesis contained a fundamental error: at the beginning of the 20th century, the masses of Uranus and Neptune were estimated incorrectly, and in fact, there were no unexplained deviations in their motion.
Lowell, unknowingly, was searching for an astronomical phantom. But Tombaugh, armed with a blink comparator—a device for alternately comparing photographs of the same patch of sky on different nights—discovered a tiny moving dot on February 18, 1930. "This is a great example of scientific chance," Schindler noted. " Tombaugh was looking for a phantom, but he found a planet. "
From that moment on, Pluto occupied a special place in the American worldview. In an era of economic and social decline, the country acquired a new national symbol—the only planet discovered by an American.
ONE OF OUR OWN AMONG STRANGERS, A STRANGER AMONG OUR OWN
The status Pluto received after its discovery seemed unshakable until 2006, when the International Astronomical Union (IAU) decided to demote the planet.
Until that moment, there was simply no formal definition of the word "planet" in science. Everyone knew that they were large celestial bodies orbiting the Sun, but it wasn't clear where planets ended and large asteroids and other celestial bodies began.
By the mid-2000s, as more and more objects were discovered in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune's orbit, including Eris, which is comparable in size to Pluto, it was decided to formalize the concept.
The IAU, the recognized body responsible for naming and classifying astronomical objects, has established three criteria. To be considered a planet, an object must orbit the Sun, possess sufficient mass to be spherical under its own gravity, and be able to "clear the vicinity of its orbit of other objects."
Pluto passed the first two criteria, but failed the third. Its orbit intersects with numerous icy Kuiper Belt objects. Instead of permanently banishing Pluto from the IAU, the IAU created a new category—"dwarf planet," of which it became the most prominent representative.
The decision immediately sparked controversy that continues to this day. Critics of the definition point to its inherent inconsistency. If the "orbital clearing" criterion is formally applied, then Pluto isn't the only one subject to "demoting."
Earth, strictly speaking, hasn't cleared its "neighborhood" either: it shares its orbit with asteroids. Jupiter shares its orbit with huge groups of so-called Trojan asteroids, but no one calls it a dwarf planet, which would be absurd given its size—it's the largest planet in the Solar System.
The debate gained new momentum in July 2015, when NASA's New Horizon probe flew past what was then known as the ninth planet. The images it transmitted transformed Pluto from the blurry pixels it had been for so many years to a fully-fledged world with a complex geography. The probe beamed back images of Alp-sized icy mountains, vast ice plains, and a bright, heart-shaped region known as Tombaugh Regio.
Moreover, at that time it was already known that Pluto had an atmosphere, and that it also had five satellites, while classical planets like Mercury and Venus did not have any.
These new data have bolstered the case for Pluto's return to planetary status.
University of Arizona professor Eric Asfaugh gave a very clear example in a comment to The Independent : if we were to one day find an Earth-sized planet around another star, teeming with life, but orbiting a super-Jupiter (the name for a class of objects an order of magnitude more massive than Jupiter), it would not be considered a planet under the strict IAU rules—and this, in the scientist's opinion, is absurd.
Yet their opponents from the other camp, including astronomer Mike Brown, whose discoveries prompted the division of planets into normal and dwarf planets in 2006, insist that scientific classification should help us understand the structure of the solar system, not serve individual impulses and sympathies.
"NASA leaders can look back with nostalgia on the days when Pluto was considered a planet, but the scientists working on these issues will continue to try to explain and classify the objects of the solar system in a way that truly helps us understand the world we live in," Brown said, commenting on Isaacman's speech.
SPACE AMBITIONS
The NASA chief's remarks came at a time when the United States is experiencing yet another surge in self-awareness. Rhetoric about the US's sovereign right to dictate its rules to the world has long since transcended diplomacy and trade, and recent events in Venezuela and the Middle East, as well as statements about Greenland, Cuba, and the Panama Canal, are clear evidence of this.
In this context, Isaacman's remarks about the need to restore recognition to Clyde Tombaugh seem like yet another attempt to restore historical justice in a specifically national context. Pluto is not just a celestial body, but the only planet discovered by an American, and its downgrading is perceived by some in the US political elite as a symbolic defeat.
The slogan "Make Pluto a Planet Again " (MPAPA), voiced by the head of NASA and already picked up by the media, is an obvious copy of Donald Trump's main election slogan " Make America Great Again " (MAGA), and this approach turns a scientific problem into one of the elements of a political game.
However, reducing the NASA chief's motivation solely to his own jingoistic patriotism would be an oversimplification. The domestic lobby also played a role. The Lowell Observatory in Arizona remains a significant scientific and educational center that consistently conveys nostalgia for "our" planet.
Senator Moran, who initiated the conversation with Isaacman, represents Kansas, where Clyde Tombaugh grew up and where the self-taught astronomer has long been a source of pride. Therefore, for politicians in the state, protecting Tombaugh's legacy is one way to secure voter support ahead of the midterm elections on November 3, 2026.
Furthermore, it's worth remembering the context of the budget hearings themselves, where the Pluto proposal was aired. As Scientific American points out, Isaacman's remarks came amid fierce criticism from Democrats: the Trump administration proposed cutting NASA's science funding by 46 percent, an initiative the agency's chief supported.
A bright, emotionally charged statement about Pluto's reinstatement can temporarily shift the attention of the press and congressmen from unpleasant questions about budget cuts to another high-profile topic.
LIMIT OF AUTHORITY
The question now is whether the American campaign to "rehabilitate" Pluto has a realistic chance of success. NASA cannot rename celestial bodies or change their classifications at will. The final say in such matters always rests with the International Astronomical Union, whose position remains unwavering to date.
IAU spokesman Ramasamy Venugopal told The Independent that the organization understands the emotions that many people feel about Pluto, but stressed that the 2006 decision was not a "demotion" but a scientific refinement that made Pluto the centerpiece of a new family of celestial bodies.
The problem is that if we follow the lead of the "rehabilitation" proponents and start considering any object massive enough to take the shape of a sphere and with its own geology as a planet, then the Solar System will be replenished not with just Pluto, but with dozens, if not hundreds, of new planets.
Ceres, Eris, and perhaps many undiscovered Kuiper Belt objects will be eligible to claim this status, and this could only deepen the rift in the scientific community, generating even more controversy and conflict.
Therefore, NASA is unlikely to be able to return Pluto to its “former glory” in the near future, which, however, does not in any way diminish the merits of the American Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the dwarf planet.
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