Why 424 astronomers are wrong, and why several thousand astrologers don’t give a hoot.

When is a planet not a planet? When a few hundred exhausted astronomers take it into their heads to say so.

As much is the message from the 2006 conference of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) held in Prague in August 2006, which cast a historic vote to downgrade the status of Pluto from planet to ‘dwarf planet’ while elevating Ceres, formerly a mere ‘asteroid’, and the recently discovered 2003 UB313 aka Zena, Warrior Princess, now officially designated as Eris, goddess of the Unknown, to similar ‘dwarf’ status.

The solar system, it seems, has been overhauled by astronomy’s version of the neo-cons – this was regime change on a cosmic scale.

The controversy created an unexpected stir. The media, normally indifferent to goings-on in the cosmos, became uppity about the astronomers’ edict, partly, one suspects, because having grown up with Mickey Mouse’s goofy pet hound Pluto (named after the planet’s discovery in 1931), commentators were sentimentally attached to the distant body. 

And partly because the IAU’s decision came out of the dark. The body had previously set up a working committee to define planetary status. The committee’s suggestions were summarily thrown out, and the vote to downgrade Pluto came only on the last day of the conference, after most delegates had gone home.

It was a coup worthy of a cold war Communist conference, using a definition that has left many leading astronomers in dismay. For hereon a planet has to have "cleared the neighborhood around its orbit,” meaning there are no neighboring asteroids and flotsam, a condition clearly flouted Jupiter, which has some 50,000 Trojan asteroids.

‘This definition stinks,’ remarked Alan Stern, leader of NASA's New Horizon's mission to Pluto. ‘Less than five percent of the world's astronomers voted. I’m embarrassed for astronomy’.

Owen Gingerich, astronomer emeritus at Harvard who headed the committee that proposed the initial definition, concurred. The new definition was “confusing and unfortunate", he said.

The one sector of planet-plotters who remained indifferent to the IAU’s deliberations were astrologers. What were they going to do now that Pluto was no longer a planet? Business as usual of course! After all, astrologers – at least the modern breed - already use assorted celestial bodies that don’t come with the stamp of planetary approval. Ceres, discovered in 1801, became astrological property back in the 1970s, along with Pallas Athene, Juno and Vesta (all discovered 1807), when feminist astrologers declared these largest of the asteroids represented ‘the re-emerging feminine’.

Chiron, a tiny planetoid, discovered in 1977, delivered another signifier to astrologers. Named after the centaur who gave up immortality to relieve the suffering of Prometheus, Chiron has, for some astrologers, come to represent ‘the wounded healer’.

Since there are some 5,000 named asteroids, some astrologers have become keen advocates of such orbiting rocks as Charles and Camilla, though the space rocks like Frank Zappa, Swissair and Toyota are yet to figure.

Pluto has been trouble from the start. Percival Lowell, the astronomer who posited the existence of ‘Planet X’ to explain the irregularities in Neptune’s orbit, died before locating his planetary grail. It was Clyde Tombaugh, a raw 23 year old self-taught astronomer hired by the Lowell Observatory, who found the planet in 1930. 

In 1978 it was found that Pluto was in reality two tightly connected worlds, with the planet locked in dumb-bell-like orbit with its Moon, Charon (named after the ferryman who rowed souls across the Styx to the underworld). Moreover, its tiny size - Pluto is around 500 times smaller than Earth – could not possibly exert the necessary gravitational pull to affect Neptune.

Tiny and far-flung it maybe, but Pluto is nonetheless granted awesome powers by modern astrology. Named after the Roman god of the underworld, best known for his abduction and rape of Persephone, Pluto is associated with the realms of the invisible, the infernal, the dead and the damned. The planet is both destroyer and transformer, a Western equivalent of Kali, the Indian goddess of destruction. Pluto can also represent power and money – the realm of the ‘plutocrat’.

Some astrologers have seen astronomy’s demotion of Pluto as a symbol of denial about the ‘dark side’ of human nature, but the reality is more prosaic, that astronomy is worried about the various objects in the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune gaining planet status. Some astronomers thought Pluto would not be dumped, simply because it was the only planet discovered by an American (a Brit found Uranus, a Frenchman Neptune).

A campaign by disgruntled astronomers to reinstate Pluto is already underway. Astrologers can sit on the sidelines, watching in amusement. Is Pluto a planet? Is Ceres a ‘dwarf’? Is Chiron just ‘a small solar system body’? For modern astrology they are all simply ‘heavenly bodies’. 

How much importance any astrologer attaches to such bodies, or for that matter to such points in space as the lunar nodes (eclipse points) is up to the individual. Heaven knows astrology loves a spat, but for once, this isn’t our quarrel.