It was in 1930 when the ninth planet in our Solar System was seen for the first time. Pluto was a sneaky little celestial body that had haunted scientists for decades with its influence on Neptune’s orbit. It was theorized that the only possible explanation for these irregularities in the eighth planet’s journey around the Sun was a ninth massive planet with a large gravitational pull, so scientists started looking for it, and finding it became a goal desired by many, as no new planets had been discovered since 1846.
Among those seeking astronomical glory was Percival Lowell, an eccentric billionaire who founded the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. A mathematician from Harvard, Percival’s obsession with finding a superior civilization drove him to look upwards, to the stars. In 1896 he financed the construction of an observatory in Arizona as a means to find intelligent life-forms on the surface of Mars and to locate the elusive ninth planet. His first goal hasn’t materialized to this day, and, sadly, he failed to see the second one accomplished, for he died in 1916, 14 years before it came to be.
Strangely enough, the man responsible for Pluto’s discovery was not a renowned scientist. He wasn’t even a scientist at all. Clyde W. Tombaugh was an astronomy aficionado living in a Kansas farm. Without any formal studies, he constructed his own telescopes, which he used to observe stars and planets, particularly Jupiter and Mars. He made drawings of both celestial bodies and decided to mail them to the Lowell Observatory, where he was soon offered a position as operator of their photographic telescope.
He started his new job in 1929, at the age of 23, and proceded to inspect photographs from far away in space to find evidence of a moving planet. His efforts payed off on February 18, 1930, after 10 months of painstakingly scanning through thousands of pictures of stars. Tombaugh found a minuscule dot of light that moved through the sky as if it possessed a planet’s orbit. After some more observation, the staff at Lowell Observatory concluded it was the ninth planet they had been searching for, even if it was significantly smaller than they’d suspected.
His discovery of Pluto —named after the Greek god of the Underworld by Venetia Burney, an eleven year old girl— brought him immediate fame. He would then pursue his formation as an astronomer at the University of Kansas, where he met his wife, Patricia Edson, with whom he had two daughters. After a career as a respected astronomer, Tombaugh died in 1997, nine years before the scientific community decided to demote Pluto from the status of planet to that of dwarf planet.
Thankfully, the decision came a few months after the launch of the New Horizons, NASA’s first spacecraft launched with the intent to fly by Pluto at a close distance. I say thankfully because it was carrying a very important payload: Tombaugh himself. Patricia agreed to donate part of her husband’s ashes to the project, and they were put into a small canister within the New Horizons probe. In 2015, the spacecraft finally reached its destination: Tombaugh’s Pluto, where it proceeded to take photographs of the planet just 7,800 miles away from its surface.
The New Horizons has continued its voyage father into space, along with the remains of a farmer whose passion for the stars and planets would bring immortality to his name back in his home planet.
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