Cosmic Oddity

Sometimes you can see it in the early morning, around sunrise. Other times, you can see it in the evening, near sunset. Probably, you have seen it more times than you can remember. I don't want to insult your intelligence, but it's just possible (I suppose) that you didn't realize what you were looking at.

Often referred to by the misnomers 'morning star' and/or 'evening star,' it is actually the planet Venus. If you go looking for it in the right place at the right time, trust me, you won't have to look very hard: It blazes with the white-hot intensity of a laser, glowering low in the sky. It is the angry, pebble-eyed stare of a one-eyed demon who has chinned himself up over the rim of the world to take a good look around, back-lit by the hearth-glow of hellfire. Gaze upon Venus for too long with a guilty conscience, and you might have to fight the urge to shrink away... or silently confess your worst sin.

Jupiter, too, is fairly easy to spot-- if you know what you're looking for. Although it is not as bright as Venus, it still outshines all but the very brightest stars as it slingshots along through the stick figures of the zodiac. If, some night, you stare at it long enough... well, nothing happens. Nothing at all. Damned good thing, too, or there'd be a whole hell of a lot of people standing around every night, looking slack-jawed up at the sky.

I know of what I speak. A couple of years ago, I saw a moonrise. It was one of the most powerful and majestic things I've ever seen...

It was a winter's night, cold and clear, well after sunset. I was leaning upon a metal railing --forearms on the top rail, one foot resting easily on the bottom rail, the other foot planted firmly on the ground-- staring at nothing at all, for no particular reason. Just killing time. Two or three hundred yards away, a pocked pile of brimstone cliffs thrust up into the night like a dull, serrated knife. I don't know how long I'd been staring at nothing but, suddenly, I realized I was staring at the pale sliver of a glowing, soft-white, cue-ball head with dull grey liver-spots, peeking over the top of the granite pile in front of me: The moon. I felt my eyes widen as I watched the pale sliver grow into a forehead, its brow cut jagged by the sharp outline of the cliffs. Holy shit, I thought, I'm watching a moonrise.

I was transfixed. I was also just a little bit surprised by my own naivete: You see, I had never before considered the possibility that one could actually watch a moonrise. Oh, don't get me wrong: Intellectually, I understood the mechanics of it --I'd certainly read enough books-- but nothing in my real-life experience had ever happened to dispel the vague notion that the moon's existence was rather ubiquitous and ordinary. In other words, I'd always taken it for granted. Modern man doesn't feel the moon down deep in his soul; it's just there, up there, somewhere. Sometimes it's full, or nearly so, like it was that night, and sometimes it's half-full and sometimes it's a crescent. Sometimes it looks bigger than usual and sometimes it's a weird color and sometimes it's over here and sometimes it's over there and sometimes it's beyond the horizon. Sometimes it's playing peek-a-boo behind the clouds. But it's always there, even when it isn't, and you rarely give it much thought.

I stood, still, barely breathing, watching its inexorable climb. A moonrise happens slowly, but you can clearly see motion if you watch carefully enough. And that motion is anything but steady. There is, in fact, a tremor-- a slight, continuous shudder as of some great, inexpressibly powerful quaking, reduced by distance and perception to a mere shiver. I had the feeling that somewhere, far beyond the ability of my pathetic human ears to hear, a tremendous, roiling thunder pealed and echoed across the vast chasms of a forgotten world, as the great gears of the cosmos ground their way through the eons.

Finally, finally, with a last staccato shudder, the moon pulled free of the dark cliffs and clawed its way into the sky. Just then, I heard the soft scrape of a footstep behind me. I'm sure I only imagined, rather than actually smelled, her understated perfume. The girl --uh, sorry-- the woman who worked in the dispatch office had just stepped outside for a smoke. She was tall and slender and auburn-haired, with long, soft, smooth curves... every one of them exactly where it should be. Smart, funny, and --despite all of that-- completely down-to-earth. In other words, she was not of this world. No, some far superior alien race, I'm sure, carefully crafted her and put her here as an experiment, and they greatly enjoy watching men of all ages run around, bumping into each other and falling over themselves for the honor of acting like idiots in her presence.

Mentally, I handcuffed my wrists to the railing and fought a sudden, strong urge to turn and grab her winter-coated sleeve, pull her close and press my palm to the small of her back and my lips against hers. Who knows where idea came from. Maybe witnessing the moonrise had made me feel acutely insignificant and empty, and some part of my psyche sought the companionship of another's warm breath and the press of winter coat against winter coat. Maybe the moonrise had left me loony-- a word that is derived from "lunatic," which in turn is derived from "lunar." Or maybe I just thought she was smokin' hot and that this would be a good time to act like an idiot.

Ah, but I digress... and it's time to get back on track.

Aside from Venus and Jupiter, there are other planets visible to the naked eye, but you have to know where and when to look, and you have to know what you are looking at. Mars glows with the sullen, orangish red of campfire embers. Mercury puts in an appearance for just a few days a year, its very real proximity to the sun always apparent. Saturn is damned tough to spot-- conditions have to be just right.

For untold millenia, stretching back to before the invention of written language, mankind knew only of these six planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. Then, late in the renaissance --1781, to be exact-- an English astronomer named William Herschel found a seventh planet. The discovery, of course, touched off a firestorm.

There has always been tension between science and religion. The Catholic Church, in particular, doesn't like anybody believing anything the Vatican doesn't tell them to... and astronomers are held in especially low regard. Herschel's discovery of a new planet really rubbed them the wrong way. One prominent bishop of the time even went so far as to declare, "It's preposterous! Frankly, I think you pulled this idea out of your anus!"

Herschel, for his part, grinned and made that "that's it" pointing gesture and exclaimed, "That's it! We'll call the new planet 'Uranus!'" Then he grinned some more and made an entirely different one-fingered gesture. This was, after all, late in the renaissance, and most people were finally beginning to realize that most bishops were a little bit nuts.

Oh, you find it hard to believe that the bishop in question would actually use the words "out of your anus"? Well, stop and consider a couple of points. One: The word "anus" is Latin, and you know how those bishops and cardinals just love to show off their fluency in Latin. Two: The word "ass," to a bishop, means "donkey," not "derriere." I rest my case.

At any rate, the name stuck. For a couple of centuries, everybody called the seventh planet "Uranus." Then, about 15 years ago, a bunch of media types got together and decided that they didn't feel comfortable saying "Yer-ANUS" on the air. Instead, they chose to call it "URINE-us," because that's a lot better.

Anyway... Naturally, the discovery of a seventh planet sparked a tidal wave of interest. Every astronomer in the world grabbed the best telescope he could lay his hands on and studied the new planet, night after night, for years on end. They charted its progress through the night sky and plotted its speculated position for those time when it wasn't visible. Eventually, the more, uh, anal types among them began noticing that the new planet wasn't behaving the way they thought it should. Some --with either way too much time on their hands or, perhaps, an overbearing wife and six screaming kids at home-- sequestered themselves in a quiet room somewhere and began to painstakingly scratch their way through some inherently painstaking Newtonian math. Eventually, they concluded that the only thing that could account for the strange orbital behavior of the seventh planet was... an eighth planet!

The eighth planet was discovered in 1846. They named it Neptune, after the Roman god of the sea. Nobody really knows why they named a planet after a god of the sea, but I'm sure it made perfect sense at the time.

In the words of the celebrated philosopher Yogi Berra, it was deja vu all over again. Astronomers the world over jumped on the Neptune bandwagon: Studying, observing, charting, plotting, and the same thing as had happened with Uranus happened again: Neptune wasn't acting they way they thought it should. Numbers were crunched, and a similar conclusion was reached: There must be a ninth planet out there somewhere.

On a cold February night in 1930, an astronomer named Clyde Tombaugh was hard at work at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. His job, on this night, was to compare photographs that had been taken about a month earlier of a portion of the sky where all the calculations said a ninth planet should be. The photos showed millions of pinpoints of light-- stars of every size and magnitude from across half the far-flung galaxy. After many, many hours of back-stiffening work, Tombaugh realized that he had one little pinpoint of light that he couldn't account for...

He had found the ninth planet.

After several months of deliberation, it was given the name "Pluto." But even before the name had been settled upon, the controversy over its nature had started. Pluto wasn't at all what anyone had expected. The mathematics they had used to predict its location indicated that it should be another so-called "gas giant," about the same size as Uranus and Neptune. Instead, Pluto was tiny-- smaller than Mercury, even. And it was definitely marching out of step with the rest of the band. Whereas the other eight planets all orbited in the same relative plane, Pluto's orbit was canted, like a beret pulled rakishly to one side. Moreover, it's orbit wasn't circular.

Okay, technically, of course, none of the planets orbit the sun in a perfect circle. Instead, their paths through space --at least, their paths relative to the sun-- describe slightly flattened circles, with the sun almost exactly in the middle of each. But Pluto's orbit was a discernible oval, and a lopsided one at that-- almost an egg-shape, with the sun off-center.

Eccentricities aside, schoolteachers began telling their students that there were nine planets in the solar system, and everybody pretty much accepted it. Within the scientific community, however, there was much head-scratching and quiet mumbling. Something, dammit, was amiss.

When they realized what it was, it only added to their confusion. All of that fancy math that they had used to find Pluto in the first place, y'see, all of that fancy math was wrong.

Actually, it's unfair to say all of the math was wrong. The incredibly ponderous and complicated equations themselves were sound enough --Isaac Newton was no schmuck-- but some of the numbers that the astronomers had been plugging into those equations were way off. It turns out that if the right numbers had been used, the equations would never have suggested a ninth planet at all. The fact that they ever did, and that Pluto happened to be exactly where Clyde Tombaugh went a-looking for it, was --quite literally-- a cosmic accident.

By now, I'm sure you've already heard that Pluto's status as a planet has been downgraded. Just last week, the International Astronomical Union decided --by a process that seems eerily Congress-like-- that Pluto doesn't quite fit their newly-drafted definition of "planet." I have heard some folks in the media characterize it by saying that Pluto has been "kicked out of the solar system." Obviously, that's not quite accurate. Pluto --like the asteroid Ceres and Halley's Comet and a million other objects whipping and zipping around ol' Sol as it makes its grand swoop through space-- is still in the solar system... It's just that it's platinum card has been rejected. It has been blackballed from that exclusive club called "The Planets" and shunned by high society.

Hopefully for NASA, Pluto will be back in vogue by the summer of 2015. That's when their New Horizons spacecraft will arrive at Pluto for the most extensive ever look-see at the, uh, not-planet. It's too late to cancel the mission, y'see: The probe was launched seven months ago. The program's projected cost is seven hundred million dollars, which means it will actually cost about a billion and a half.
Your tax dollars, hard at work.

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P.S... Coincidentally enough, Bud Selig is Major League Baseball's ninth commissioner... and should be "Plutoed."