This article tells the story of Clyde Tombaugh's serendipitous discovery of Pluto in 1930. It highlights the earlier work of Percival Lowell who theorized the existence of a ninth planet, and the perseverance of Tombaugh who used photographic techniques to finally find it.
Clyde Tombaugh didn't set out to discover Pluto when he sent his sketches of the night sky to Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona in 1929. More than anything, he just wanted to get off the farm in Kansas where he spent his days working the earth. At just 23 years old, Tombaugh sent his drawings, unsolicited, to several institutions and observatories around the United States, hoping someone — anyone — would give him some feedback on what he'd produced.
The response from Lowell Observatory, then, must have been a shock when it hit his mailbox. It was more than a critique of his drawings from professional astronomers. Instead, it was a job offer (from the head of the Observatory, no less), and one that within two years would put Tombaugh in an elite and narrow pantheon of stargazers who could claim what only the ancients could boast: the discovery of a new planet. The search for Pluto did not begin with Clyde Tombaugh, to be fair. That distinction belongs to the visionary astronomer Percival Lowell. In 1894, Lowell founded Lowell Observatory in the Arizona territory (Arizona wouldn't become a state until 1912). Originally a scion of an elite Boston family, Lowell became fascinated with the study of astronomy. With family wealth to back him, he founded an observatory in the western dark-sky desert of the U.S. and hoped to unlock the mystery of the Red Planet. He soon became fascinated by another cosmic mystery, however, and one that would be far more consequential. Uranus and Neptune, the most recently discovered planets in the solar system at the time, seemed out of sorts. Their orbits didn't add up mathematically, and Lowell was convinced there was an undiscovered planet in the far reaches of the solar system that was knocking them off-kilter. Lowell called this hypothetical world 'Planet X.' Lowell dedicated years to predicting the location of this elusive planet. He and his team at the observatory came up with calculations for the world's path and location, but by the time of his death in 1916, the planet's discovery remained elusive. With many in the scientific community convinced that there were no more planets to discover, the search for Planet X was abandoned soon after Lowell's death. But Tombaugh's journey to planetary discovery is one of the most remarkable in the history of astronomy. Born in 1906 in Illinois and raised on a farm in Burnett, Kansas, Tombaugh had a deep fascination with the night sky. With little formal training, he built his own telescopes and meticulously sketched astronomical observations out in Kansas's dark-sky country. Tombaugh sent some of his drawings off to different places, including Lowell Observatory, and he got this letter back from the director saying, 'We're just recommencing the search for a ninth planet, and we need somebody to help with it. It looks like you know what you're talking about, so why don’t you come work for us?' Schindler said. He got a one-way bus ticket, hoping that he wouldn't have to go back home in a short time, and started working at the observatory. Tombaugh arrived in 1929 hoping to prove himself, but his job was painstaking compared to sketching the night sky in Kansas. Using a technique called 'blink comparison', which involves looking at photographs of the same portion of the sky on different nights and then rapidly switching between the two images to spot any moving objects, Tombaugh searched for months. Because far-off stars would be static over successive nights, nearer, moving objects would stand out against the backdrop — but, for an object as distant as Pluto, the motion would be barely perceptible. It took months of tedious work, flipping back and forth between effectively identical photographic plates, but on February 18, 1930, Tombaugh finally found what he was looking for: a tiny moving speck against the starry background, roughly where Lowell had predicted it would be. One of the most fascinating aspects of Pluto's discovery is that it was, in part, a cosmic coincidence. 'Pluto was found really close to where Lowell thought a planet should be, but it's also a great example of serendipity in science,' Schindler said
Pluto Percival Lowell Clyde Tombaugh Planet X Astronomy Discovery History Of Science
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