Gang-gang. Relegated Pluto still in league of its own

We were there in a lecture theatre to hear Dr Andrew Cole speak on Clear skies and new horizons: What we know about Pluto and what's left to find out.

Of course what we all know about Pluto, even when we know nothing else, is that it was once thought of as a planet but then in 2006 was relegated to being just a dwarf planet. Sentimental humans projected anthropomorphic feelings on to Pluto and imagined its feelings must have been very badly hurt (like a Tony Abbott being relegated from the prime ministership) by this decision of the International Astronomical Union.

Cartoonists and illustrators were inspired. Mathias Pedersen's Poor Pluto portrayal of a now orphaned Pluto shunned by the real planets is a masterpiece of that genre. No doubt Tuesday's young woman's T-shirt too was inspired by feelings of supportive love for a broken-hearted Pluto.

Dr Cole (a scholarly American physicist he is presently at the University of Tasmania) is not very interested in populist ideas about Pluto. But he did explain in passing, before going on to bigger Plutonic matters, that Pluto got relegated because it was considered it wasn't a planet but one example of "icy kinds of objects out in the solar system, ranging from Pluto's size to just a metre across".

And yet, he continued, there were all sorts of great scientific reasons for sending an equipment-packed probe to zoom past Pluto. And in 2006 NASA's New Horizons probe ("just the size of a grand piano," Dr Cole told us, evocatively) was dispatched. Dear, lovable little Pluto (someone has called it a "celestial snowball") is far, far away and so it was not until July 2015 that the piano-sized probe skimmed past Pluto, getting as close as 12,500 kilometres.

Dr Cole says that this "fly-by" of Pluto has told us a lot about its atmosphere. And so we find for sure, confirming earthly speculations, that "the atmosphere is dominated by nitrogen, there's a strong component of methane, and there are a number of other hydrocarbons". He told us that one of the many surprises (New Horizons' findings contradicting scientific guesses made from earth) is that the celestial snowball's "upper atmosphere is much colder than expected".

Dr Cole (his shoulder-length hair and dark beard made him look, from my distant vantage at the back of the theatre, like the Christ of the Renaissance old masters) is a very, very serious scientist. Readers, compare your nondescript job descriptions with his. He is a senior lecturer in physics and astronomy and the ANU advises: "He uses optical and near-infrared telescopes to study the formation and evolution of dwarf galaxies in the nearby universe, and to search for exoplanets using the technique of gravitational microlensing."

And, seriously scholarly, he put into his lecture some populist elements of the subject you could tell his cerebral heart wasn't really into discussing. So, for example, late in the lecture he showed some pictures of Pluto taken by New Horizons and said a little dismissively he'd come in his talk "to the nature documentary part, to the pretty pictures session".

Call me a bogan but the pictures enthralled me. I bit my reporter's notebook so as not to gasp aloud at them, sure that the audience of cerebral scholars would turn and stare at me. One of the most gasp-making pictures showed loveable Pluto's atmosphere lightly, diaphanously decorated by what Dr Edwards explained are "multiple, finely spaced haze layers ... they're blue in colour and blue implies the particles are really small".

The loveliness, the mystery of cold and craggy Pluto and its pale blue hazes, stayed with me on the drive back to Fyshwick.

And, driving to and from the ANU for Tuesday's occasion, this columnist listened to ABC Classic FM, engaging in an activity that was once frowned upon.

The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. And one of the things they, some of them, do in 1931 is to finger-wag that one should never listen to one of those new-fangled car radios while driving one of those still a bit new-fangled motor cars.

In the new edition of Radio Waves magazine (journal of the Historical Radio Society of Australia) Richard Begbie contributes a piece about the history of car radios. In his research he came across an "Important Notice" that in 1931 the manufacturers of a car radio were issuing with every radio. The notice seems impossibly quaint in these times when so many of us listen while we commute and generally seem always glued to and distracted by a device of some kind.

"Important Notice. For your own safety and the safety of other drivers we strongly recommend that you use your automobile radio receiver only when the car is stationary. With road conditions the way they usually are you should concentrate on driving and you should not have your attention distracted by musical programs or talks while the car is in motion.

"For this reason no provision has been made with the Pilot Auto-Radio for the suppression of interference from the ignition system. To prevent a wave of accidents it is likely that state legislators will [soon] make radioing-while-you-drive illegal."