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On the discovery of Pluto
?
Copyright
[c] 1987 by Michael Finley Writing Services
2096 Dayton Avenue * St. Paul MN 55104 * (612) 646-4642
PLANETARY
PATROL:
World-Finder
Clyde Tombaugh Is Keeping His Watch
By
Michael Finley
The day in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto
using a machine called a blink comparator, he spent an agonizing
90 minutes watching Gary Cooper star in The
Virginian,
hoping that when he emerged from the moviehouse the cloud cover would
have lifted, and he could take a second look through the telescope
at Lowell Observatory, to confirm his finding.
He was too excited to read, he was not permitted to telephone family
or friends with the news, he was unable to think with any clarity.
He watched the western, particularly the gunfight scene, in an agony
of apprehension. It wasn't until the next night that Tombaugh and
two colleagues stood at the lens in on a mountaintop in Flagstaff,
AZ and viewed "Planet X" for the first time with human eyes.
The meaning of all this shivering? For years, astronomers had supposed
Pluto was up there. Percival Lowell, who built the Lowell Observatory
in Flagstaff -- and who was the first person to suggest that Mars
had canals, and that a race of intelligent Martians must exist --
had scanned the heavens for many years searching for the unnamed
planet. The search for a TransNeptunian body was one of the great
quests of astronomy -- the barrier would most likely fall to the
most senior and most seasoned of living skywatchers.
Young Tombaugh, brought to the observatory at age 23, found the
tiny dot in the skies after only a year and 40,000 blink comparator
attempts. The young man from the plains states became the only individual
in the 20th century -- the only person since J.C. Galle discovered
Neptune in 1846 and William Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781
-- to find a brand new world.
The new world was named Pluto by Tombaugh and the other Lowell astronomers,
after first considering Chronos (some say the first two letters are
an homage to Percival Lowell). Pluto was the furthest from the sun
(3.66 billion miles from the sun, on average), and experienced the
longest year (it revolved around the sun every 248 years, compared
to Earth's 365 days).
Pluto may have been a satellite of Neptune that ages ago escaped
and went into orbit around the sun instead. It was a cold world,
typically a brisk -360`F, and it occupied the most tilted and elliptical
orbit of any planet. Pluto, named after the dark region of death,
and its slightly smaller moon, the dismal boatman Charon, are very
likely two gaseous icebergs bobbing through the nether regions of
space.
Today, at 82, Clyde Tombaugh is still scanning the night skies.
Thousands of nights spent poring through the infinite expanse around
us, he is still capable of a good shiver.
"I always say that it feels nice to have discovered a planet," Tombaugh
says. "Nice" might not be the most adequate word to describe such
a claim, but then, what would be? The magnitude of the universe,
Tombaugh says, has kept him from getting a swelled head about his
achievements.
After all, he said, Pluto is one small, planet, the furthest one
we know about in a single solar system. "It's been calculated that
the number of stars in the universe is up around 1021
-- that's 10 to the 21st power, which rounds off to about one septillion
stars, of which our sun is one.
"Someone has said that this means that there are about 100 stars
in the universe for every grain of sand on all the beaches and in
all the oceans and seas of our world."
Does that mean Tombaugh grasps the immensity of what is any better
than ordinary people?
Tombaugh is matter-of-fact in his awe. "I've worked with it all
my life, so think I can understand a bit," he says. "In high school
I calculated, based upon what we knew of the star Betelgeuse, what
its mass was, and came up with one duodecillion cubic inches. That's
a 1, with 39 zeroes lined after it."
And of all those septillion stars, he said, it is a reasonable expectation
that there are many trillions of planets, and of those trillions
there are, in all likelihood, more than a few thousand capable, as
our Earth is, of supporting life. Given those odds, there are probably
other astronomers out there discovering planets as he did, fairly
routinely. So his achievements benefit, sort of, from the very sort
of perspective they helped create.
Back in Illinois, where he grew up, geography had been an abiding
interest, until one day he looked up from the mundane plattes and
maps of the prairie and glimpsed the greater cosmography beyond.
With
the family's move in 1922 to the clear prairie skies of Kansas, Clyde
constructed his first telescope for night viewing, his gazing halted
by a hailstorm that destroyed the family wheat crop -- Clyde had
to work as farmhand to make ends meet. Though untrained and lacking
the polish of students at the great observatories, he had the requisite
patience for standing still for hours observing minute changes in
the skies. In addition to passion, he had great, undeniable talent,
which did not go unnoticed by Lowell Observatory, which hired him
to assist in astronomical research.
Fourteen months later, comparing images on his blink comparator,
a tool for detecting changes in position of faraway objects by
juxtaposing photographic images of where the object may be, he noticed
the discrepant dot which was Planet X. "That's it," he recalls thinking.
And
it it was. As the father of Pluto -- and as the namesake of the
radioactive element plutonium, named, like uranium and neptunium,
after the outer planets -- Tombaugh has garnered enough laurels for
most individuals. Within astronomical circles, however, he is perhaps
more celebrated for the sheer volume of his discoveries and output.
The prevailing view is that his discovery of an 1,800-galaxy star
supercluster is more important all by itself, and that a lifetime
of discoveries of galactic star clusters, asteroids, and observations
of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn have yielded much, much
more in terms of human knowledge.
As a scientist, Tombaugh said, one is exposed every day to things
that would amaze most people, though most if the work is pretty static.
But he still feels the same thrill he felt as a boy in Kansas.
"It still really boggles my mind sometimes, it's so magnificent and
overwhelming. The sense of wonder never goes away. To this day
my favorite moments are those spent looking through the telescope
-- I've built several, and have one at home, a 16-inch instrument
I made in 1960.
Tombaugh is author of several books: The
TransNeptunian Planet Search
(1961), The
Geology of Mars,
and, (coauthored with Dr. Patrick Moore) Out
of the Darkness: The Planet Pluto
(1980). Though retired from his professorship at New mexico State
University, he continues as astronomer emeritus, and has not lost
track of the planets' comings and goings.
Patricia Tombaugh, Clyde's wife for 53 years, got used early on
to having a husband whose thoughts were more often on the goings-on
in the next galaxy than next door. The same for his two children,
five granddaughters, and four great grandsons. Tombaugh smiles --
discovering a world can't hold a candle to populating one.
Tombaugh is a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Las
Cruces, and had been Unitarian at the time of discovering Pluto,
at least in his thinking. "Long before I knew there was a Unitarian
church, I was thinking Unitarian ways. I was raised Presbyterian,
and then as a Methodist, but I soon got disillusioned with those.
The Scopes 'Monkey Trial'[1925] turned me off to orthodox churches,
and I've been a free-thinker all these year. I think you'd find
that many professional astronomers are Unitarian, if they're anything
at all."
In 1980, the golden anniversary of Pluto's discovery, a panel of
astronomers and physicists met in Las Cruces to pay tribute to Tombaugh
and to summarize what has since been learned about the strangest
and furthest of the known solar objects.
It was announced at that time, too, that a planetoid object until
then known only as Minor Planet 1604 (1931 FH), one of dozens of
asteroids discovered by Tombaugh during his sojourns among he stars,
had been named and registered as "Tombaugh" in his honor. Tombaugh's
comment was that at last he had a piece of real estate no one could
touch.
Could there be yet another Planet X, out beyond Tombaugh's? Tombaugh
doesn't know, no one does, but there's room enough. As far away
as it is, it's still nowhere near the edge of the solar system, he
says. Pluto is only 39 AUs [astronomical units] away from the sun
-- the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri, is 270 AUs away. Some
people talk about an alter-ego to Earth known as Nemesis, invisibly
opposite the Sun from us. And a host of comets and asteroids range
through the outer regions. Other planets, other worlds -- why not?
For
one thing, Clyde Tombaugh would not deny to other humans the unique
sensations that come with uttering,
"That's it."
# # #
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