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A short story about Pluto, who discovered it and what we just learned about it

By Alvin Soon - 28 Jul 2015

A short story about Pluto

Pluto, the closest we’ve ever seen it. Image credit: NASA.


A self-taught astronomer discovers our ninth planet

85 years ago, the astronomer Clyde W. Tombaugh, at the age of 24, discovered the first photographic evidence of our solar planet’s ninth planet.

Tombaugh grew up on a farm in Illinois, in the United States. He’d always wanted to go to college, but a hailstorm put an end to his plans when it ruined his family’s farm crops. That didn’t deter him from his love of astronomy, at the age of 20, he started building his own telescopes. He eventually landed a job as a researcher at the Lowell Observatory in Arizona.

While working there, Tombaugh was given the task to look for a then-suspected ninth planet in the solar system, which had been predicted but never found by Percival Lowell and William Pickering.

Tombaugh spent thousands of hours looking over millions of star images, and on February 18th, 1930, he finally found a tiny orb that had moved positions between months. This was the ninth planet that they had been looking for.

The original image plates from which Clyde Tombaugh discovered Pluto. Amazing how he saw it. Image credit: Lowell Observatory Archives, via Wikipedia.

 

A 11-year old girl finds Pluto’s name

A new planet had been found, but what to name it? Since Percival Lowell had predicted the planet’s existence 15 years earlier, his widow suggested naming it ‘Percival.’ The director of the Harvard Observatory suggested ‘Cronos,’ the son of Uranus from Greek myth.

But it was an 11-year old British schoolgirl, Venetia Burney, who eventually had the honour of naming the ninth planet. When walking with her grandfather and talking about the new planet’s discovery, Burney suggested the name ‘Pluto,’ after the Greek god of the underworld.

"Photo of Venetia Burney, aged 11, c. 1929" by Source (WP:NFCC#4). Licensed under Fair use via Wikipedia.

Burney’s grandfather, a retired head Librarian from the University of Oxford, immediately suggested the name to his friend, Herbert Hall Turner, professor of astronomy at the University of Oxford. The Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) loved it, and so did the team at Lowell, who found it fitting that ‘Pluto’s’ first two letters coincided with Percival Lowell’s initials.

(By the way, the other famous Pluto, from Disney, had nothing to do with the planet’s name. The character made its appearance after the planet was named, not before.)

 

NASA sends a probe out to see Pluto

On January 19th, 2006, NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration) launched the New Horizons probe into space. New Horizons was the first mission in NASA’s New Frontiers program, a series of space exploration missions to research the Solar System’s planets. New Horizons was sent specifically to look at Pluto, its moons, and the Kuiper belt beyond it. Its path would also take it past Jupiter, through 2006 and 2007. It would take New Horizons nine years to finally reach Pluto.

Its mission wasn’t purely scientific though, it also carried a trace of sentimentality and respect. Besides the scientific equipment it needed, the New Horizons probe also left with an ounce of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes, as well as a dust counter named after Venetia Burney.

The New Horizons probe. Image credit: NASA. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Pluto gets taken down a notch

When New Horizons left Earth, Pluto was still classified as a planet. But there had been rumbling for years to bring Pluto’s status down a notch.

Many other bodies had been discovered orbiting the sun in the same area as Pluto, which put Pluto as part of the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper belt is a region of the Solar System beyond the orbit of Neptune, which consists mainly of small asteroids and three dwarf planets (of which Pluto is the largest).

Eight months after New Horizons’ launch, the International Astronomical Union demoted Pluto to a dwarf planet, because of its smaller mass. Not every astronomer agrees with this decision however.

 

Our closest look yet at Pluto

New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14th, 2015, giving us the closest look yet at the planet/non-planet. It transmitted incredible images of Pluto across five billion kilometres of space, showing us the dwarf planet in high-resolution for the first time.

Researchers discovered a range of icy mountains on the surface of Pluto, together with flowing ice on a plain west of a massive heart-shaped region. NASA says that ice (nitrogen ice, not water ice) may still be flowing there now, akin to the massive glaciers on our planet. A stunning last look at Pluto as New Horizons flew past showed the dwarf planet backlit by our sun, revealing a higher atmosphere than previously expected.

Pluto, backlit by the sun. Image credit: NASA.

It was an incredible look at our Solar System’s furthest planet/non-planet, 85 years after its discovery by Clyde Tombaugh. Never in his wildest dreams would he imagine, I think, that his ashes would pass so closely to the dot he once glimpsed through a telescope.

 

What’s next for the New Horizons?

Over the next few weeks, the New Horizons will continue sending back data it collected over Pluto. The probe is now heading through the Kuiper belt, and NASA is planning to send it to visit other objects in the belt. Three targets have been identified, but which has not yet been decided.

 

Sources

 

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