And Pluto

by Durga Chew-Bose

My very energetic mother just served us nine pizzas. Or maybe it was peaches. Plums. Pickles. Pies? Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, followed by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. And Pluto.

There they were, the nine planets as I’d mnemonically learned them in school. Like an oddball insurance policy for our memory, mnemonics have this uncanny way of outlasting even the most important moments in our lives. My very energetic mother rolls off my tongue. It’s that sing-song quality, the nonsensical Seuss-ness that tricks me into believing retention is remunerative, no matter how inessential the information. Years passed before I ever thought about that nine-planet sequence.

But in August 2006, nine became eight. Pizza was now swapped for nachos.

Pluto was effectively “demoted,” declared the New York Times headline. “After years of wrangling and a week of bitter debate, astronomers voted on a sweeping reclassification of the solar system.” The verdict was in: Pluto was benched. Not even a sixth man. Shown the door, sent packing. “A triumph” many astronomers described, “of science over sentiment.” An expat now living in the Kuiper belt.

From this day forward, the Times article went on to state, Pluto would be newly dubbed a “dwarf planet.” Doc, Grumpy, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful, Sneezy, Dopey, and Pluto. And Pluto.

This past Tuesday I woke up to Pluto news. NASA’s New Horizons space probe, which launched nearly a decade ago on January 19th 2006, had performed its intended flyby: 3,463 days later, we were staring at Pluto’s sphere mug. Like a lead ball bullet with a heart-shaped birthmark and Melvillian whale on its side, orbiting some 3 billion miles from Earth, Pluto was also dotting my Twitter timeline. Pluto was trending. Pluto was popular again. Pluto was Pluto, again.

On its website, NASA describes the New Horizons spacecraft as “about the size of a piano.” At first I pictured a Baby Grand. A Steinway hurtling through space, passing Pluto and its five moons at 30 thousand miles per hour. There’s something remarkably peaceful about imagining a piano up there, faraway and weightless. Floating and unmanned, collecting stardust between its keys. These are the places my mind goes when I think about the universe, about NASA, about astronauts in their marshmallow suits, about planets and stars. I imagine Steinways in space. I enjoy the consonance of Cape Canaveral. I picture engineers in mission control rooms wearing polo shirts with iron-on patches. I experience Armageddon, as it was meant to be experienced, flashing before my eyes in Michael Bay oranges and teal.

And so on Tuesday morning, unsure if this icy mass of rock, approximately two thirds the size of our moon, was still being catalogued a “dwarf planet,” I opened my computer readied to ask Google. I typed “is” only to have Google wittingly complete the rest: “is Pluto a planet.”

Nope. Still demoted.

But later that night as I continued my Pluto deep dive, ending up in remote parts of the internet I so rarely explore — science trivia I can barely wrap my head around, measurements that may as well be myth — and as I stared at charts that kept insisting on scaling data in proportion to tennis balls and grains of rice, I stumbled upon a sentence that left me speechless in the only manner I know how to be speechless. Which is to say, what slipped from my mouth was a shocked yet anodyne, Whoa.

In a New York Times piece by science writer Dennis Overbye, and accompanied by a beautifully concise video, which includes interviews with the New Horizons team of scientists, Overbye says, “the inventory of major planets — whether you count Pluto as one of those or not — is about to be done.” Sure, okay. Major planets, my very energetic Mom’s pizza, her nachos: done. Seen ’em all.

But Overbye goes on, clinching or rather stretching, my capacity for loss: “None of us alive today will see a new planet up close for the first time again.” There came my whoa. I can’t help it. I’m especially prone to this kind of drama. To the way space spooks me. How despite its sheer spread, I regard it at times with claustrophobic panic. Or, conversely, how when I think about its vastness — its vastness times infinity plus one — I feel like hardly anything at all. Like a speck. Insignificant times infinity plus one.

It’s not lost on me that Overbye’s eulogizing tone mimics his name: Overbye. Like See ya later. No more planets to meet. Zilch, arrivederci, that’s a wrap! Over-bye! But then I clicked on his bio, newly excited by articles about Black Hole hunters, dark matter, “stellar tadpoles” and “galactic nurseries” where planets are, if you will, born. His author page, which details his career, books published, and notes that Overbye lives in Morningside Heights with his wife and daughter, concludes with this sentence: “In their house, he reports, Pluto is still a planet.”

Just like that, we were back to pizza, peaches, plums, pies. Momentarily I felt reconstituted, because in my mind some stuff plays for keeps even when it changes: the position of planets, for one, and how space, as unknown and scopious as it reaches, still presents itself to me as nine Styrofoam bobbles. The Solar System as near-ornament, which I constructed with care, excitement and pure awe — tons of awe, awe times infinity plus one. As E.B. White wrote in his essay The Ring of Time, “Whatever light is generated, whatever excitement, whatever beauty, must come from original sources…It is the difference between planetary light and the combustion of stars.”

Here on Earth, where the ocean brews, the sky is falling, and with each new day comes some cataclysmic bad thing cobbled with little hints of hope, space has always tendered a sense of marvel that dates back to the Styrofoam-ball mobile I made in school and hung with string. I sponged Mars with red paint, bending pipe cleaners for Saturn’s rings, and I loyally painted Canada a little too big, carefully detailing the burnt-leaf, seared-fringe shape of Quebec’s outline, my home province.

It’s in that same classroom where I learned the Earth was spinning. Constantly. Spinning, spinning, spinning, at frightening speeds that could potentially flatten my face into putty or toss countries like beanbags across bodies of water. It’s in that same classroom where I stared down at my shoes, firmly planted on linoleum tiles, and wondered why I couldn’t see the ground moving, and where I might have willed my imagination with great focus and fancy, to perceive — if for only a second — the ground moving. How could the Earth be rotating and I feel nothing? It took me a second to grasp the concept of gravity without imagining houses hanging upside down, laundry lines topsy-turvy, trees flipped and crab apples tumbling.

I’d like to claim I delayed my competence on purpose. That it was part of my scheme to quiet sureness and avoid the boring bits that arrive with certainty. Safeguarding Pluto or scrunching my nose at gravity’s pull, or nowadays still, welcoming how quickly mnemonics coax from me my past, all these quirks, console my strangest yet most beloved sensation: the calm I derive from knowing there are things simply too big to really get. The best stories, after all, are born from misunderstandings, from conning narrative into what I’ve misheard, mistook, or blundered entirely.

Durga Chew-Bose is a writer living in Brooklyn.