The next meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society will be on
Saturday, November 1, 2025
at the
Cernan Earth and Space Center.
Meeting Agenda:
5:15 PM -- Astro-talk over pizza and soft drinks. (Donations are welcome to offset the cost of food and beverage.)
6:00 PM -- The LECTURE will begin
7:30 PM -- Telescope viewing (weather permitting) of the Moon, Saturn and Neptune!
Anyone with a telescope is invited to bring it and show off what you can view!
Speaker: Dr. Joshua Burton
Topic: PLUTO HAD IT COMING: Orbital resonance, the Kuiper Belt, and Planet 9
About the Presentation:
The IAU's demotion of Pluto (and elevation of Ceres, let's not forget!) to "dwarf planet" status focused
popular attention on the subtle concept of orbital dominance: Neptune, Earth, and even Earth's moon have
cleared their orbits of competition, while the inner moons of Saturn, asteroids from Cruithne to the Trojans,
and Pluto and friends all demonstrate a lively interplay of resonant behaviors. By looking past the mere
positions of dwarf objects to their true dynamics in "phase space" (where both position and velocity play
complementary active roles), we catalog traditional and novel asteroid "families", as well as exotically
named new families (centaurs, jumping trojans, plutinos, twotinos, cold and hot cubewanos, haumeids, and
ETNOs) out in the cold and the dark. Equipped with this perspective, we can understand why the search for
a very cold (~300 AU) Planet Nine is heating up.
About our Speaker:
Dr. Joshua Burton earned his Ph.D. in 1990 from UC Berkeley, where he worked with Mary K. Gaillard and Bruno Zumino
during the exciting early years of supergravity and string theory. He has held research appointments at the Weizmann
Institute of Science, Harvard, Brown, and Northwestern, publishing original work on supersymmetry, particle
astrophysics, cosmology, and high-energy physics beyond the Standard Model. In 1997, a friend's start-up company
lured him away from academia into software, and through acquisition he eventually wound up at IBM. He retired in
2016 to return to his true calling as a physics educator and now teaches physics and runs the astronomy club at
our award-winning local Proviso Mathematics and Science Academy.
Looking Ahead: The December meeting of the Chicago Astronomical Society (CAS) will be on Saturday, December 6,
2025 at the Cernan Earth and Space Center at 5:15 Event Calendar
Membership --- If you enjoy the activities of the CAS, please become a member.
Regular membership is only $30 for an individual and $50 for a family membership.
We now accept payment via Zelle.
Join Us!
We would like to thank the Cernan Center and its director Kris McCall for their support of the CAS and astronomy/science education. We encourage CAS members and all others who support science education to purchase memberships for the Cernan Center.
We would also like to thank our members for their past and continued support.
We hope that you can attend. Please feel free to forward and invite friends!
Clear Skies!
Tony Harris
V.P. and Program Manager,
Chicago Astronomical Society
