For no explainable practical reason, humans are enamored with – and even empathetic toward – specific inanimate objects. Our first car. A choice coffee mug. And for a particular subset of the population, that extends to a dimly lit frozen sphere currently 3.3 billion miles away.Several hundred of them pilgrimage to Arizona each February for the I Heart Pluto Festival. Flagstaff is the site where, nearly a century ago, a telescope lens picked out what was hailed for decades as the ninth planet of our solar system.Today, schoolchildren are taught that adding Pluto to the roster was a mistake — that there are only eight proper planets after all, and that Pluto belongs to the also-ran class of “dwarf planets.”AdvertisementAdvertisementBut that demotion doesn’t stop the faithful from showing up for several days of lectures, pub crawling and birthday cake.“It’s about the love affair. It’s about this subculture of people who love it so much that you guys have a festival,” said Alan Stern, to about 200 people on a night of Pluto-related talks at Flagstaff’s Orpheum Theater, on Valentine’s Day. Stern is the Principal Investigator of New Horizons, a still-active spacecraft mission that flew by and took close-up imagery of Pluto in 2015 — revealing, contrary to artists’ conceptions of a generic meteor-battered moonlike sphere, that the surface featured massive glaciers and a vast heart-shaped region, bright with frozen nitrogen.There is no such thing as an I Heart Jupiter — or any other planet — Festival, Stern reminded the crowd.Pluto also stirs proprietary feelings because it held the distinction, among the once-official roster of nine planets, of being the only member discovered from the US. The five planets closest to Earth — Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn — are all visible to the naked eye, so they were known to ancient stargazers. Astronomers discovered Uranus from England in 1781 and Neptune from Germany 65 years later, and both of those are scientifically “unloved,” as measured by the lack of dedicated space missions sent to explore them.The Pluto Discovery Telescope, open to the public on the grounds of Flagstaff’s Lowell Observatory, is in the same spot as when astronomer Clyde Tombaugh used it to discov …
