Pluto: The Dwarf Planet

Our Solar System

by Greg Roza

Once thought to be a planet itself, distant Pluto is now called a dwarf planet. Tiny, rocky, cold Pluto stands guard at the edge of our solar system. It is so far away that even our most powerful telescopes can't see it clearly. Readers will learn about Pluto and our efforts to discover more about this mysterious dwarf planet.

24 pages, Paperback

First published January 8, 2010

Reviews

[Karla · Rating 5 out of 5]

LOVE that it's nonfiction. SAD pluto isn't a planet. I met the man who discovered it, and he inspired me to love astronomy. BUT definitions change, and the book explains simply WHY in an age-appropriate manner. There's extension links and a glossary. Pages are numbered. Wonderful photographs and illustrations.

[Audrey's Picture Books · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is an example of a children's nonfiction book being so simplistic that it borders on the inaccurate. The summary on the back describes Pluto as "stand[ing] guard at the edge of our solar system." Apparently, the writers of the summary haven't heard of the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud. The text of the book itself isn't, as far as my inexpert eye can tell, inaccurate, but the presentation of the series shows an attachment to the model of the solar system that was being taught when I was in elementary school in the early 1990s--a string of planets, interrupted by the asteroid belt, ending with Pluto, which is the last thing in the solar system. That was all very well in 1991, but a lot has changed in Astronomy since then. This series doesn't really reflect that. Sure, they subtitled Pluto's book "The Dwarf Planet," but that doesn't really fix the problem. It's a bit like taking a series that was around when I was a kid and using a permanent marker to change every mention of the word "planet" into "dwarf planet." You can't just change the terminology. You have to change the way you talk about the entity. Dwarf planets, as an important astronomical category, surely merit their own explanatory volume, just as asteroids and comets do, along with the sun. No such volume is included. Short of a book dedicated to explaining what, exactly, a dwarf planet is, the authors could have counteracted the Pluto-as-the-ninth-planet impression by releasing a stand-alone volume about another of the major dwarf planets--perhaps Eris or Ceres or Makemake. Again, no such volume is included, taking Pluto completely out of the context in which astronomers understand it. Moreover, the series neglects to mention Pluto's membership in the Kuiper belt. This vast swath of space, with its countless celestial bodies and many dwarf planets, is, in fact, never even mentioned in the entire series. To read this series, you'd think astronomers still hadn't realized it was there. Worse, it implies a 23-year outdated view of the solar system in which Pluto orbits the sun all alone in the outer reaches the the solar system. Our young science afficcionados deserve to have the basic map of the solar system presented to them in the way that current scientists see it, not the way adults remember having learned it.