Ever experienced the Boise Greenbelt’s Planet Walk? It won’t be around much longer
Pluto has had a tough couple of decades.
Formerly the ninth planet in our solar system, Pluto was demoted in 2006 to a “dwarf planet.” Only 1,400 miles wide, about half the width of the lower 48 states, Pluto failed to meet the International Astronomical Union’s updated criteria to be a planet because it lacks gravitational dominance in its own orbit. (We’ve all been there.)
“Pluto is dead,” Mike Brown, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology, told NBC at the time.
But until now, there’s been at least one glimmer of recognition for tiny Pluto. In a park in Boise, Idaho, on planet Earth, a nod to Pluto’s glory days remained in the Boise River Greenbelt’s decades-old Planet Walk. Established before Pluto’s downgrade, the exhibit has continued to include Pluto all these years since.
Alas, those days are numbered.
On Tuesday, Boise’s City Council voted to allow the Discovery Center of Idaho to replace and upgrade the old exhibit with a new Planet Walk that will traverse Julia Davis Park. The new exhibit, set to open in the spring, will start on Julia Davis Drive near the park’s tennis courts, wend its way past Boise Square Park, and circle back West along the Greenbelt.
But it will do so without Pluto.
Construction is set to begin in April, and the exhibit will be open to the public about a month after that, said Eric Miller, the executive director of the Discovery Center. The new exhibit, which the Discovery Center is purchasing from a company based in Ireland, will include signage in both English and Spanish, he said, and will have a corresponding smartphone audio guide. Like its predecessor, the new Planet Walk is scaled to represent the proportional distances between planets.
With an average temperature of -387 degrees Fahrenheit, Pluto must be used to the cold shoulder by now. Still, the fact that Boise’s moving on must sting.
Sorry, Pluto. We’ll give you some space.
This story was originally published December 5, 2024 at 10:40 AM.
