Pluto — The planet that wasn’t
It used to be a planet and then it wasn’t. Pluto’s demotion to a dwarf planet has been a bone of contention amongst many. This fight has overshadowed a milestone in human space travel. We have actually sent a spacecraft that has flown by Pluto, has made scientific observations and sent back images that have changed our understanding of this solar system object.
How was it discovered? In the 1840s, astronomers noticed that the orbit of Uranus was being disturbed by something other than Neptune and the hunt for a ninth planet was started. The job of locating this Planet X was given to a 23-year-old astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. He had to systematically image the night sky in pairs of photographs and then examine them to see if any objects had moved. After nearly a year of this, Tombaugh noticed an object that seemed to have moved on photographs taken on January 23 and 29, 1930. He had discovered Pluto, subsequently confirmed with further photographic evidence.
How did it come to be called Pluto? Amidst a lot of discussion around its name, an 11-year-old girl from Oxford, England, called Venetia Burney, suggested the name. Pluto is the Roman God of the underworld and she was interested in classical mythology. Venetia’s grandfather was a former librarian at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and he forwarded the name to an…
