July 22, 2013 • 24 mins
It was the only planet to have been discovered by an American, but it's no longer classified as a planet. Who found Pluto, and how did astronomers even know to look for the so-called Planet X on the edge of our solar system?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm wis. So when you were a kid, did
you know what you wanted to be when you grew up.
I wanted to be a millionaire and live in a mansion, okay, so,
(00:23):
and then after that I wanted to be an author.
So you're kind of on track. No, well, not for
being a millionaire and an author. That's really hard to do. Um.
I really thought for a long time as a child
that I wanted to be an astronomer. Like I really
thought that, uh. And I was obsessed with our World
(00:44):
Book Encyclopedias and all of the various entries on the
Solar System, and I would trace them and I would
make these trifled pamphlets out of notepaper for each planet.
But in the making of all of these pamphlets, which
I published to my family, I would always get frustrated
with Pluto because we just didn't have enough facts in
the nineteen one edition of the World Book Encyclopedia to
(01:08):
fill out one of my pamphlets. And I couldn't just
keep tracing the circle over and over. You know what,
if we had been on the fence about about bringing
you to work with us, which we were not on
a fence, but if we had been, this story would
have been the cell Um. I also went through a
phase where I did those on animals. I was really
(01:29):
into publishing my own pamphlets as a kid. I don't
know what that was about. You're also on track, Yeah,
kind of, I said. I didn't become an astronomer except us,
you know, an amateur that just enjoys it. Uh. But
Pluto was always tricky because we never knew as much
about it because of its distance, and it's relatively newer
(01:50):
to humans in terms of it existing and being than
other things, so we don't have as much research on it.
We haven't known more now than certainly we did then
even so, Yeah, but having not known that it was
there until relatively recently, we haven't had as much time
to gather information. Uh. There will be hopefully a lot
(02:11):
more really soon. But so Pluto was discovered on February
eighteenth and nineteen thirty, but of course it existed for
a long time before then, and port Pluto was a planet,
and then it was demoted and it was actually the
only planet to have ever been discovered by an American.
Just kind of an interesting point of note. I think
it's also the only time that an astronomical announcement his
(02:34):
drawn fury Well, yes, I can't think of any other
fury inducing announcements about astronomy, you know, except for except
for in the very very early days of astronomy, when
you know, things like planets revolve around the Sun. Where yeah, well,
I there have actually been a lot because any big
(02:56):
discovery in astronomy often kind of shakes the sound of
what came before it. So there there's been some outcry.
We just didn't have as much media to cover it before.
But it does make you wonder, how do we even
think to look away out on the edge of our
Solar system for this tiny little object that would have
been very difficult to find, and how did scientists and
(03:20):
researchers find it. So it starts with suspicion, Yes, yes,
started thinking that it might be there, right Perceval Lowell,
who was born in eighteen fifty five, it gets the
credit for being the first person to suspect that Pluto
was out there, passed the eight planets that were known
to exist in the Solar System at that time, but
he was never able to find conclusive evidence. And Lowell
(03:44):
was a really interesting character. He had actually worked as
a travel writer specializing in Asia, and as a foreign
secretary before turning to astronomy. He had studied mathematics in college.
He came from a very good family. Uh, and he's
actually probably more famous for his belief that Mars was
uh once inhabited by an alien species that had established
(04:06):
agriculture and irrigation on the red planet. And those assertions
may sound a little bit nutty to our ears today,
but uh, the important thing is that Lowell's passion for
astronomy and astronomical study actually led him to found the
Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. And he was not only
interested in Mars. Decades before Lowell's interest in astronomy, other
(04:28):
astronomers had noted an irregularity in the orbit of Uranus,
which led them to the discovery of Neptune. So you're
trying to imagine how this works. As planets are orbiting,
the Sun's gravity is pulling on them the gravity of
other planetary bodies. They're also on each other. So because
(04:49):
of the way that Uranus was orbiting, they were pretty
sure there was something else out there, but even figuring
Neptune's influence into all the orbital equations for your and
us that there were still discrepancies between the mathematical predictions
of the orbit and the actual observed orbit that you
could see. This led to the theory that there was
(05:10):
yet another planet in the Solar System beyond your Iness
and Neptune, and Lowell became obsessed with finding it. Lowell
performed his own mathematical calculations in an effort to pinpoint
the likely location of what was being called at the time,
planet X, and in nineteen o five he really just
kind of developed a concerted effort and he and the
(05:32):
staff of his observatory began an extensive search for this
planet X. Lowell published his book Memoir on a trans
Neptunian Planet in nineteen fifteen, and you can actually read
that online. We'll have the link in our show notes.
Love reading things on on me too. And Lowell actually
died in November of nineteen sixteen. He was sixty one
(05:53):
at the time and he had not yet found his
missing planet, but he left behind a large monetary legacy
to continue the search. His widow initially disputed the endowment,
but the search went on. The funding had been depleted
by the legal battle, but it still was enough to
keep this uh search for planet X going. And that's
(06:15):
where we get to Clyde Tombaugh, who was a very
important figure in all of this. Tomba was born on
February four six and Street, or Illinois, and he became
interested in astronomy after he got a telescope as a
gift from his uncle. He became so interested in the
telescope that after high school, when he couldn't afford college,
(06:35):
he studied optics on his own and in n he
built himself a homemade telescope. He made more telescopes after
that first one, even grinding the lenses and mirrors for
them himself, which is pretty impressive in my book, Like that,
I can't afford a college education, I'm going to study
and kind of give myself one. To the point that
(06:56):
he could grind his own lenses for telescopes, it's pretty impressive.
It was a delicate It's delicate work. Yeah, uh. And
Tomba's story goes almost like wonderfully fairy tale wish fulfillment here.
So using these telescopes, he had built. He studied the
night sky, and he had made drawings of Mars and
Jupiter as seen through those telescopes, and he sent them
(07:19):
to the Lowell Observatory more for like feedback on you know,
if he was on the right track, if he was
seeing the right things, etcetera. But instead of getting feedback,
they were so impressed with his work that they actually
offered him a job in astronomy, which he had never
formally studied. So that speaks a lot to his sort
of scientific mind on its own that he could just
(07:42):
magically procure a job in atronomy without an advanced dedication.
He was hired in to help with searching for a planet,
the mysterious planet X, which Perceval Lowell had suspected was
out beyond Neptune. Tomba used a blank comparator, which is
an instrument that optically superimposes photographic plates so it's like
(08:05):
they're blinked from one to another and researchers can see
tiny differences between the two. And he did this in
an attempt to track down Lewel's planet X. And the
blank comparitor is really amazing, like it's kind of these
tube photographic plates and you look through what's almost like
a microscope eye piece, and you literally just flip back
(08:26):
and forth. And we're talking about a photograph taken through
a telescope with like thousands of tiny dots on it
that are all heavenly bodies, and someone with a very
keen eye tries to see any variance between the two
because they're taking you know, aimed at the same place,
but a little time distance apart. And it's I mean,
(08:46):
if you just think about staring at a sheet of
dots on like a piece of paper and trying to
see which ones are different on two, you can get
a sense of how yeah, so just monotonous this could
potentially be. And attention to detail you have to have, right,
It's like looking at the differences between two cells of
a hand drawn animated filmy, but instead of looking at
(09:09):
a nice pretty picture, you're looking at a field of stars,
just dots on a page. Uh. However, tom Baugh obviously
keen on attention to details, since he had self educated
to the point that he could do some pretty impressive things. Uh,
he managed to find what they were looking for. His
(09:30):
work paid off pretty quickly, and it was the following
year that he found what was called at the time
the ninth planet. Uh. He pinpointed Pluto on February eighth,
nineteen thirty and he was only twenty four at the time.
It was a pretty early age to be making a
very large, significant scientific discovery, again with no formal training.
(09:54):
I just I keep coming back to that because he
did so many impressive things without having gone to graduate
school to get a PhD in astronomy. Yeah, well that
happened later, but yes, So the payoff for all this,
apart from the fact that he discovered a planet, is
that he received the Jackson Guilt metal in gift from
the Royal Astronomical Society. But even more importantly, he got
(10:17):
a scholarship to the University of Kansas. He earned his
bachelor's and continued to work at Lowell both during and
after his studies. He also earned his master's in nineteen
thirty nine. Tombau worked at Lowell for fourteen years altogether,
and he discovered numerous heavenly bodies while doing his research there,
including star clusters, comets, and galaxies. But back to Pluto,
(10:40):
because I feel like tombos story is another one that
could be another podcast on its own. He had a
very interesting life. But the month after the discovery was made,
they announced that they had found this heavenly body to
the public on March thirteenth of nineteen thirty, which was
also Percival Lowell's birthday, uh and on my onet of
that year, after the public had submitted suggestions for the
(11:02):
naming of this new heavenly body, the name was chosen,
and it was allegedly submitted by an eleven year old
girl from England, and it was Pluto. And Pluto is
of course the Roman name for the Greek god of
the underworld. But one of the significant things about choosing
Pluto is that the symbol for Pluto includes representations of
the letter P and the letter L, which were the
(11:23):
initials for Percival Lowell. So it's kind of a nice
way to name it on his behalf without naming it
directly after him. So let's talk a little bit about
this body that they found. It is extremely farrowing five
point nine billion kilometers, which is three point seven billion
miles from the Sun, and its diameter is two thousand,
(11:43):
three d forty kilometers, which is uh one thousand, four
hundred and fifty four miles, So it's less than one
fifth the size of Earth, and it's actually smaller than
our moon. It's also extremely cold. The surface temperature is
around minus three seventy five degrees fahrenheit, which is minus
to see us. Pluto solar year, which is the time
it takes to travel around the Sun, takes the equivalent
(12:05):
of two hundred and forty eight Earth years. It's circumference
at the equator is four thousand, four hundred thirty seven
point seven miles, which is seven thousand, two hundred thirty
one point nine kilometers. And then we get to the moons,
which are actually pretty interesting. So Pluto has five moons
that we know of so far, Sharon Nick's Hydra P
(12:27):
four and P five, and Sharon was discovered in It's
about half the size of Pluto. And over the years
a lot of astronomers have theorized that Pluto Sharon is
actually a binary system, so Sharon doesn't revolve around Pluto.
They're actually revolving around each other with a gravity gravitational
point fixed between them. Uh. Just an interesting thing, and
(12:51):
that is why there is a Jonathan Coulton song called
Year My Moon that is about that very thing. Nick's
and Hydra were discovered in two thousand five. P four
was discovered in two thousand one, and P five was
discovered in two thousand twelve. Scientists believe that the moons
of Pluto were formed when the dwarf planet collided with
another planet sized object. According to Mark show Walter, who
(13:15):
is of the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, he
has this great quote, which is the Moon's form a
series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls.
Just a lovely image. Pluto's elongated orbit is also tilted
in relation to the other planets. It actually passes inside
the orbit of Neptune as it makes its way around
(13:36):
the Sun. And then we get to the controversy. Uh,
it's kind of sad. Pluto is the only celestial body
ever to lose its status as a planet, so it's
the only one that's ever been demoted, which is also
a theme in the Jonathan Colton. In two thousand six,
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet and given the
number designation of one thirty four DASH three forty. Because
(14:00):
they're continued to be discoveries of heavenly bodies at the
edge of the Solar System, and some of them were
actually bigger than Pluto. It became clear that they needed
to take another look at Pluto's status as a planet,
so the International Astronomical Union created a definition of the
word planet in two thousand six involving three criteria. UH. One,
(14:20):
it has to be an object in space that orbits
the Sun too, and this is obviously for planets in
our Solar System. To it has to be a nearly round,
rigid body. And three, it needs to clear the neighborhood
around its orbit. But because Pluto orbits along the inner
edge of the Kuiper Belt, UH, it doesn't meet the
(14:41):
third criteria. Astronomers have discovered and identified more than one
thousand other items in the Kuiper Belt that are really
similar to Pluto and sometimes come near it, so it
doesn't really meet that third criterion. Uh. The only rule, however,
for dwarf planets is that they have to be round,
so Pluto can be classified that way. And it's all
(15:03):
kind of started because of a display that was going
on that Neil de grass Tyson often gets the heat
for at the Hayden Planetarium, where they just kind of
quietly changed it up in their displays. I think in
the year two thousand and then it kind of started
getting a little bit of groundswell of discussion, and then
this officially happened, and so Nil dess Tyson is often
(15:25):
kind of labeled as the man who devoted Pluto, but
he really wasn't. There was this whole other vote and
discussion going on amongst other astronomers. It's just not through
Neil de grass Tyson under a bus. That's just I
don't want to throw any scientists under the bus. I
don't want to throw anybody ever under a bup. Never
they're doing they're doing work that's a lot of us
(15:48):
don't have the the knowledge to do. And it's important
to those of us that thought we wanted to be
astronomers but didn't end up there. So in night, Clyde
Tombaugh was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame
at the New Mexico Museum of Space History for his
(16:09):
discovery of Pluto and other heavenly bodies. He died at
his Los Cruces, New Mexico home, at the age of ninety,
so he did not live to see his discovery bumped
down to the list of dwarf planets UH. We are
getting very close to what we hope will yield some
(16:31):
really exciting information about Pluto UH. In July, of NASA's
New Horizons probe is expected to fly by the dwarf
planet UH, and so this will undoubtedly lead to new
knowledge about Pluto, which still remains pretty mysterious to us
compared to other parts of our Solar system because it
is so far away. That will be the furthest out
(16:51):
that we have sent this probe. Oh, I can't wait.
I'm going to be that dufus that's like up at
all hours of the night looking data to come in.
I've been up at all hours of the night for
a number of astronomical things for sure, Like oh, when
the Mars were over landed, I was awake. I was
texting my best friend like a fiend and kind of
(17:12):
crying a little bit because I was I was up
for the Mars rover. And then the next night was
abe your shower. There's there's definitely been. That's one of
the things that I think has just been awesome about
the Internet is making it possible for just the people
on the ground to get all the same things at
the same time as the people in Michigan droll. Yeah,
(17:33):
we had very little delay from the GPL people getting
info to it being broadcast on television and the internet.
If you have the the mission coverage channel is part
of your cable package, which I'm lucky enough to have
right well. And also now thanks to the Internet, when
there is uh like a solar eclipse on the other
(17:56):
side of the planet, you can watch it from your
desk and though it not naytime where you are, with
no risk to your eyesight. I just remember that being
such a cautionary tale as a kid. There's gonna be
an eclipse. Don't look, don't look at the sun. Uh.
Astronomy it's the best thing. I would love to do
more and more things on astronomy history because it's so
(18:17):
wonderful and I just love science in general. So yeah,
we'll see what the future holds for Pluto. Its history
has been kind of interesting and unique in several ways
in terms of our knowledge of it. Uh. And we'll see,
maybe it will get reclassified yet again. Once the probe
goes by, it go new horizons, find something new, Uh,
then we'll discover it as some fabulous thing on it
(18:41):
life now probably not it's not at least as we
classify life so far, but we never knew. Hey, guess
what what. I also have a couple of pieces of so.
The first one is from our listener Tim, and Tim
has a very cool job. He just British history at
the Sorbonne in Paris. So Tim, I'll be visiting soon.
(19:05):
I wish. Uh, yeah, that sounds dreamy to me. And
he is writing to us about our podcasts on the
Irish potato famine, and he says, where I grew up
in the west of Ireland, the countryside is dotted with
thousands of abandoned villages from this time, which were like
cooperative farm hamlets of maybe ten or twelve dwellings. Often
(19:25):
these have been totally reclaimed by the undergrowth and have
no modern road connections. But if you tramp out into
the field sometimes you notice that there's a cobbled path
hidden in the grass beneath your feet, and then under
the nearby brambles are old gateways and the remains of
fireplaces and front doors. In old maps they have names
and streets and village squares, and on new maps there's
(19:46):
simply nothing. They're vanished. It really is quite sad to
think of people who lived and loved here, perhaps dying
in these houses or leaving on mass for their village
to disappear from history. Sadder still is the fields around
the villages U are invariably surrounded by a network of rigid,
parallel lines in the landscape, the outlines of quote lazy
(20:06):
bead potato fields where once the people of these villages
pulled their rotting harvest out from the ground in devastation.
I thought you might like that little personal detail that
not many people notice. Uh, he's absolutely right, that's it's
one of those things I never would have thought about. Uh.
And not having you know, immediate access to that area
it who would not have done something that I would
(20:27):
have seen? And Pete manages it is interesting the way
there are reclaims history on its own. Yeah. So I'm
glad he pointed that out because people should know those
were still there well and in a much less uh
much less tragic sense. It reminds me that were there
were train tracks that went near my house when I
was a kid, and as shipping things by train became
(20:51):
fallen out of favor, they were completely removed and within
a couple of years you couldn't really tell unless you
knew that they're been train tracks there. Yeah. I also
have another piece of listener mail from our listener and
and uh, it just made me so happy to read
it that I wanted to share it. And Anne says, Hi,
(21:12):
everybody at the podcast past and present, just wanted to
thank you for being such a good company when I'm
out walking. So far this year, we have logged three
hundred and seventy five miles together, and you have helped
me lose grace with this because it's serious. One pounds
since last April. I haven't caught up on the present
yet and I hope to never run out of podcast
to sweat to Thanks again and keep up the great work.
(21:32):
And you are awesome. That was why I just wanted
to say that. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Uh, that's
pretty inspiring. So thank you Anne for sharing that, because
that's a really cool thing. Yeah, you should be lauded
and jeered at all points. I love the idea of
people listening to us while they're making healthy changes. Yeah, thoughtsome,
(21:54):
do you listen to podcasts while you run? Never? I
I have a hard time listening to podcast that's while
I run. I do too. I can while I walk,
for sure. I can absolutely while I'm walking or if
I'm on the elliptical. Yeah, but when I around I
need like running is my need. Yeah, there has to
be music when I'm running. I do listen to a
lot of podcasts when I'm traveling a long way, when
(22:15):
I'm waiting for things. I have a confession to make,
which is that I have self imposed a restriction where
I'm not allowed to listen to podcasts while I'm driving
because I get so absorbed in what is being discussed.
I maybe don't make safe driving choices. I can't behind
the wheel. Yeah, I do the opposite, where I get
distracted by the fact that I'm driving mist I miss
(22:38):
important things and I kind of go eat, what are you?
What are they talking about? Now? So and you aren't
awesome Again, I'll say it many times over. I'm thinking
it constantly. If you want to share any historical info
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(23:01):
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(23:22):
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
And I'm wis. So when you were a kid, did
you know what you wanted to be when you grew up.
I wanted to be a millionaire and live in a mansion, okay, so,
(00:23):
and then after that I wanted to be an author.
So you're kind of on track. No, well, not for
being a millionaire and an author. That's really hard to do. Um.
I really thought for a long time as a child
that I wanted to be an astronomer. Like I really
thought that, uh. And I was obsessed with our World
(00:44):
Book Encyclopedias and all of the various entries on the
Solar System, and I would trace them and I would
make these trifled pamphlets out of notepaper for each planet.
But in the making of all of these pamphlets, which
I published to my family, I would always get frustrated
with Pluto because we just didn't have enough facts in
the nineteen one edition of the World Book Encyclopedia to
(01:08):
fill out one of my pamphlets. And I couldn't just
keep tracing the circle over and over. You know what,
if we had been on the fence about about bringing
you to work with us, which we were not on
a fence, but if we had been, this story would
have been the cell Um. I also went through a
phase where I did those on animals. I was really
(01:29):
into publishing my own pamphlets as a kid. I don't
know what that was about. You're also on track, Yeah,
kind of, I said. I didn't become an astronomer except us,
you know, an amateur that just enjoys it. Uh. But
Pluto was always tricky because we never knew as much
about it because of its distance, and it's relatively newer
(01:50):
to humans in terms of it existing and being than
other things, so we don't have as much research on it.
We haven't known more now than certainly we did then
even so, Yeah, but having not known that it was
there until relatively recently, we haven't had as much time
to gather information. Uh. There will be hopefully a lot
(02:11):
more really soon. But so Pluto was discovered on February
eighteenth and nineteen thirty, but of course it existed for
a long time before then, and port Pluto was a planet,
and then it was demoted and it was actually the
only planet to have ever been discovered by an American.
Just kind of an interesting point of note. I think
it's also the only time that an astronomical announcement his
(02:34):
drawn fury Well, yes, I can't think of any other
fury inducing announcements about astronomy, you know, except for except
for in the very very early days of astronomy, when
you know, things like planets revolve around the Sun. Where yeah, well,
I there have actually been a lot because any big
(02:56):
discovery in astronomy often kind of shakes the sound of
what came before it. So there there's been some outcry.
We just didn't have as much media to cover it before.
But it does make you wonder, how do we even
think to look away out on the edge of our
Solar system for this tiny little object that would have
been very difficult to find, and how did scientists and
(03:20):
researchers find it. So it starts with suspicion, Yes, yes,
started thinking that it might be there, right Perceval Lowell,
who was born in eighteen fifty five, it gets the
credit for being the first person to suspect that Pluto
was out there, passed the eight planets that were known
to exist in the Solar System at that time, but
he was never able to find conclusive evidence. And Lowell
(03:44):
was a really interesting character. He had actually worked as
a travel writer specializing in Asia, and as a foreign
secretary before turning to astronomy. He had studied mathematics in college.
He came from a very good family. Uh, and he's
actually probably more famous for his belief that Mars was
uh once inhabited by an alien species that had established
(04:06):
agriculture and irrigation on the red planet. And those assertions
may sound a little bit nutty to our ears today,
but uh, the important thing is that Lowell's passion for
astronomy and astronomical study actually led him to found the
Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona. And he was not only
interested in Mars. Decades before Lowell's interest in astronomy, other
(04:28):
astronomers had noted an irregularity in the orbit of Uranus,
which led them to the discovery of Neptune. So you're
trying to imagine how this works. As planets are orbiting,
the Sun's gravity is pulling on them the gravity of
other planetary bodies. They're also on each other. So because
(04:49):
of the way that Uranus was orbiting, they were pretty
sure there was something else out there, but even figuring
Neptune's influence into all the orbital equations for your and
us that there were still discrepancies between the mathematical predictions
of the orbit and the actual observed orbit that you
could see. This led to the theory that there was
(05:10):
yet another planet in the Solar System beyond your Iness
and Neptune, and Lowell became obsessed with finding it. Lowell
performed his own mathematical calculations in an effort to pinpoint
the likely location of what was being called at the time,
planet X, and in nineteen o five he really just
kind of developed a concerted effort and he and the
(05:32):
staff of his observatory began an extensive search for this
planet X. Lowell published his book Memoir on a trans
Neptunian Planet in nineteen fifteen, and you can actually read
that online. We'll have the link in our show notes.
Love reading things on on me too. And Lowell actually
died in November of nineteen sixteen. He was sixty one
(05:53):
at the time and he had not yet found his
missing planet, but he left behind a large monetary legacy
to continue the search. His widow initially disputed the endowment,
but the search went on. The funding had been depleted
by the legal battle, but it still was enough to
keep this uh search for planet X going. And that's
(06:15):
where we get to Clyde Tombaugh, who was a very
important figure in all of this. Tomba was born on
February four six and Street, or Illinois, and he became
interested in astronomy after he got a telescope as a
gift from his uncle. He became so interested in the
telescope that after high school, when he couldn't afford college,
(06:35):
he studied optics on his own and in n he
built himself a homemade telescope. He made more telescopes after
that first one, even grinding the lenses and mirrors for
them himself, which is pretty impressive in my book, Like that,
I can't afford a college education, I'm going to study
and kind of give myself one. To the point that
(06:56):
he could grind his own lenses for telescopes, it's pretty impressive.
It was a delicate It's delicate work. Yeah, uh. And
Tomba's story goes almost like wonderfully fairy tale wish fulfillment here.
So using these telescopes, he had built. He studied the
night sky, and he had made drawings of Mars and
Jupiter as seen through those telescopes, and he sent them
(07:19):
to the Lowell Observatory more for like feedback on you know,
if he was on the right track, if he was
seeing the right things, etcetera. But instead of getting feedback,
they were so impressed with his work that they actually
offered him a job in astronomy, which he had never
formally studied. So that speaks a lot to his sort
of scientific mind on its own that he could just
(07:42):
magically procure a job in atronomy without an advanced dedication.
He was hired in to help with searching for a planet,
the mysterious planet X, which Perceval Lowell had suspected was
out beyond Neptune. Tomba used a blank comparator, which is
an instrument that optically superimposes photographic plates so it's like
(08:05):
they're blinked from one to another and researchers can see
tiny differences between the two. And he did this in
an attempt to track down Lewel's planet X. And the
blank comparitor is really amazing, like it's kind of these
tube photographic plates and you look through what's almost like
a microscope eye piece, and you literally just flip back
(08:26):
and forth. And we're talking about a photograph taken through
a telescope with like thousands of tiny dots on it
that are all heavenly bodies, and someone with a very
keen eye tries to see any variance between the two
because they're taking you know, aimed at the same place,
but a little time distance apart. And it's I mean,
(08:46):
if you just think about staring at a sheet of
dots on like a piece of paper and trying to
see which ones are different on two, you can get
a sense of how yeah, so just monotonous this could
potentially be. And attention to detail you have to have, right,
It's like looking at the differences between two cells of
a hand drawn animated filmy, but instead of looking at
(09:09):
a nice pretty picture, you're looking at a field of stars,
just dots on a page. Uh. However, tom Baugh obviously
keen on attention to details, since he had self educated
to the point that he could do some pretty impressive things. Uh,
he managed to find what they were looking for. His
(09:30):
work paid off pretty quickly, and it was the following
year that he found what was called at the time
the ninth planet. Uh. He pinpointed Pluto on February eighth,
nineteen thirty and he was only twenty four at the time.
It was a pretty early age to be making a
very large, significant scientific discovery, again with no formal training.
(09:54):
I just I keep coming back to that because he
did so many impressive things without having gone to graduate
school to get a PhD in astronomy. Yeah, well that
happened later, but yes, So the payoff for all this,
apart from the fact that he discovered a planet, is
that he received the Jackson Guilt metal in gift from
the Royal Astronomical Society. But even more importantly, he got
(10:17):
a scholarship to the University of Kansas. He earned his
bachelor's and continued to work at Lowell both during and
after his studies. He also earned his master's in nineteen
thirty nine. Tombau worked at Lowell for fourteen years altogether,
and he discovered numerous heavenly bodies while doing his research there,
including star clusters, comets, and galaxies. But back to Pluto,
(10:40):
because I feel like tombos story is another one that
could be another podcast on its own. He had a
very interesting life. But the month after the discovery was made,
they announced that they had found this heavenly body to
the public on March thirteenth of nineteen thirty, which was
also Percival Lowell's birthday, uh and on my onet of
that year, after the public had submitted suggestions for the
(11:02):
naming of this new heavenly body, the name was chosen,
and it was allegedly submitted by an eleven year old
girl from England, and it was Pluto. And Pluto is
of course the Roman name for the Greek god of
the underworld. But one of the significant things about choosing
Pluto is that the symbol for Pluto includes representations of
the letter P and the letter L, which were the
(11:23):
initials for Percival Lowell. So it's kind of a nice
way to name it on his behalf without naming it
directly after him. So let's talk a little bit about
this body that they found. It is extremely farrowing five
point nine billion kilometers, which is three point seven billion
miles from the Sun, and its diameter is two thousand,
(11:43):
three d forty kilometers, which is uh one thousand, four
hundred and fifty four miles, So it's less than one
fifth the size of Earth, and it's actually smaller than
our moon. It's also extremely cold. The surface temperature is
around minus three seventy five degrees fahrenheit, which is minus
to see us. Pluto solar year, which is the time
it takes to travel around the Sun, takes the equivalent
(12:05):
of two hundred and forty eight Earth years. It's circumference
at the equator is four thousand, four hundred thirty seven
point seven miles, which is seven thousand, two hundred thirty
one point nine kilometers. And then we get to the moons,
which are actually pretty interesting. So Pluto has five moons
that we know of so far, Sharon Nick's Hydra P
(12:27):
four and P five, and Sharon was discovered in It's
about half the size of Pluto. And over the years
a lot of astronomers have theorized that Pluto Sharon is
actually a binary system, so Sharon doesn't revolve around Pluto.
They're actually revolving around each other with a gravity gravitational
point fixed between them. Uh. Just an interesting thing, and
(12:51):
that is why there is a Jonathan Coulton song called
Year My Moon that is about that very thing. Nick's
and Hydra were discovered in two thousand five. P four
was discovered in two thousand one, and P five was
discovered in two thousand twelve. Scientists believe that the moons
of Pluto were formed when the dwarf planet collided with
another planet sized object. According to Mark show Walter, who
(13:15):
is of the Seti Institute in Mountain View, California, he
has this great quote, which is the Moon's form a
series of neatly nested orbits, a bit like Russian dolls.
Just a lovely image. Pluto's elongated orbit is also tilted
in relation to the other planets. It actually passes inside
the orbit of Neptune as it makes its way around
(13:36):
the Sun. And then we get to the controversy. Uh,
it's kind of sad. Pluto is the only celestial body
ever to lose its status as a planet, so it's
the only one that's ever been demoted, which is also
a theme in the Jonathan Colton. In two thousand six,
Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet and given the
number designation of one thirty four DASH three forty. Because
(14:00):
they're continued to be discoveries of heavenly bodies at the
edge of the Solar System, and some of them were
actually bigger than Pluto. It became clear that they needed
to take another look at Pluto's status as a planet,
so the International Astronomical Union created a definition of the
word planet in two thousand six involving three criteria. UH. One,
(14:20):
it has to be an object in space that orbits
the Sun too, and this is obviously for planets in
our Solar System. To it has to be a nearly round,
rigid body. And three, it needs to clear the neighborhood
around its orbit. But because Pluto orbits along the inner
edge of the Kuiper Belt, UH, it doesn't meet the
(14:41):
third criteria. Astronomers have discovered and identified more than one
thousand other items in the Kuiper Belt that are really
similar to Pluto and sometimes come near it, so it
doesn't really meet that third criterion. Uh. The only rule, however,
for dwarf planets is that they have to be round,
so Pluto can be classified that way. And it's all
(15:03):
kind of started because of a display that was going
on that Neil de grass Tyson often gets the heat
for at the Hayden Planetarium, where they just kind of
quietly changed it up in their displays. I think in
the year two thousand and then it kind of started
getting a little bit of groundswell of discussion, and then
this officially happened, and so Nil dess Tyson is often
(15:25):
kind of labeled as the man who devoted Pluto, but
he really wasn't. There was this whole other vote and
discussion going on amongst other astronomers. It's just not through
Neil de grass Tyson under a bus. That's just I
don't want to throw any scientists under the bus. I
don't want to throw anybody ever under a bup. Never
they're doing they're doing work that's a lot of us
(15:48):
don't have the the knowledge to do. And it's important
to those of us that thought we wanted to be
astronomers but didn't end up there. So in night, Clyde
Tombaugh was inducted into the International Space Hall of Fame
at the New Mexico Museum of Space History for his
(16:09):
discovery of Pluto and other heavenly bodies. He died at
his Los Cruces, New Mexico home, at the age of ninety,
so he did not live to see his discovery bumped
down to the list of dwarf planets UH. We are
getting very close to what we hope will yield some
(16:31):
really exciting information about Pluto UH. In July, of NASA's
New Horizons probe is expected to fly by the dwarf
planet UH, and so this will undoubtedly lead to new
knowledge about Pluto, which still remains pretty mysterious to us
compared to other parts of our Solar system because it
is so far away. That will be the furthest out
(16:51):
that we have sent this probe. Oh, I can't wait.
I'm going to be that dufus that's like up at
all hours of the night looking data to come in.
I've been up at all hours of the night for
a number of astronomical things for sure, Like oh, when
the Mars were over landed, I was awake. I was
texting my best friend like a fiend and kind of
(17:12):
crying a little bit because I was I was up
for the Mars rover. And then the next night was
abe your shower. There's there's definitely been. That's one of
the things that I think has just been awesome about
the Internet is making it possible for just the people
on the ground to get all the same things at
the same time as the people in Michigan droll. Yeah,
(17:33):
we had very little delay from the GPL people getting
info to it being broadcast on television and the internet.
If you have the the mission coverage channel is part
of your cable package, which I'm lucky enough to have
right well. And also now thanks to the Internet, when
there is uh like a solar eclipse on the other
(17:56):
side of the planet, you can watch it from your
desk and though it not naytime where you are, with
no risk to your eyesight. I just remember that being
such a cautionary tale as a kid. There's gonna be
an eclipse. Don't look, don't look at the sun. Uh.
Astronomy it's the best thing. I would love to do
more and more things on astronomy history because it's so
(18:17):
wonderful and I just love science in general. So yeah,
we'll see what the future holds for Pluto. Its history
has been kind of interesting and unique in several ways
in terms of our knowledge of it. Uh. And we'll see,
maybe it will get reclassified yet again. Once the probe
goes by, it go new horizons, find something new, Uh,
then we'll discover it as some fabulous thing on it
(18:41):
life now probably not it's not at least as we
classify life so far, but we never knew. Hey, guess
what what. I also have a couple of pieces of so.
The first one is from our listener Tim, and Tim
has a very cool job. He just British history at
the Sorbonne in Paris. So Tim, I'll be visiting soon.
(19:05):
I wish. Uh, yeah, that sounds dreamy to me. And
he is writing to us about our podcasts on the
Irish potato famine, and he says, where I grew up
in the west of Ireland, the countryside is dotted with
thousands of abandoned villages from this time, which were like
cooperative farm hamlets of maybe ten or twelve dwellings. Often
(19:25):
these have been totally reclaimed by the undergrowth and have
no modern road connections. But if you tramp out into
the field sometimes you notice that there's a cobbled path
hidden in the grass beneath your feet, and then under
the nearby brambles are old gateways and the remains of
fireplaces and front doors. In old maps they have names
and streets and village squares, and on new maps there's
(19:46):
simply nothing. They're vanished. It really is quite sad to
think of people who lived and loved here, perhaps dying
in these houses or leaving on mass for their village
to disappear from history. Sadder still is the fields around
the villages U are invariably surrounded by a network of rigid,
parallel lines in the landscape, the outlines of quote lazy
(20:06):
bead potato fields where once the people of these villages
pulled their rotting harvest out from the ground in devastation.
I thought you might like that little personal detail that
not many people notice. Uh, he's absolutely right, that's it's
one of those things I never would have thought about. Uh.
And not having you know, immediate access to that area
it who would not have done something that I would
(20:27):
have seen? And Pete manages it is interesting the way
there are reclaims history on its own. Yeah. So I'm
glad he pointed that out because people should know those
were still there well and in a much less uh
much less tragic sense. It reminds me that were there
were train tracks that went near my house when I
was a kid, and as shipping things by train became
(20:51):
fallen out of favor, they were completely removed and within
a couple of years you couldn't really tell unless you
knew that they're been train tracks there. Yeah. I also
have another piece of listener mail from our listener and
and uh, it just made me so happy to read
it that I wanted to share it. And Anne says, Hi,
(21:12):
everybody at the podcast past and present, just wanted to
thank you for being such a good company when I'm
out walking. So far this year, we have logged three
hundred and seventy five miles together, and you have helped
me lose grace with this because it's serious. One pounds
since last April. I haven't caught up on the present
yet and I hope to never run out of podcast
to sweat to Thanks again and keep up the great work.
(21:32):
And you are awesome. That was why I just wanted
to say that. Yeah, that was pretty cool. Uh, that's
pretty inspiring. So thank you Anne for sharing that, because
that's a really cool thing. Yeah, you should be lauded
and jeered at all points. I love the idea of
people listening to us while they're making healthy changes. Yeah, thoughtsome,
(21:54):
do you listen to podcasts while you run? Never? I
I have a hard time listening to podcast that's while
I run. I do too. I can while I walk,
for sure. I can absolutely while I'm walking or if
I'm on the elliptical. Yeah, but when I around I
need like running is my need. Yeah, there has to
be music when I'm running. I do listen to a
lot of podcasts when I'm traveling a long way, when
(22:15):
I'm waiting for things. I have a confession to make,
which is that I have self imposed a restriction where
I'm not allowed to listen to podcasts while I'm driving
because I get so absorbed in what is being discussed.
I maybe don't make safe driving choices. I can't behind
the wheel. Yeah, I do the opposite, where I get
distracted by the fact that I'm driving mist I miss
(22:38):
important things and I kind of go eat, what are you?
What are they talking about? Now? So and you aren't
awesome Again, I'll say it many times over. I'm thinking
it constantly. If you want to share any historical info
with us or your personal triumphs like AUNT, you can
do so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. Can
also connect with us on Twitter at missed in History
(23:01):
and at Facebook dot com slash history class stuff. We're
on tumbler at missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
and we're on Pinterest. If you would like to learn
a little something more about what we talked about today,
you can't. Go to our website and just type in
Pluto in the search bar and you will get several
different entries, one of which is why is Pluto no
longer a planet? Which will go into a little bit
(23:22):
greater detail about what we talked about today. If you
want to research almost anything else you can think about,
you can do that on our website, which is how
stuff Works dot com. For more on this and thousands
of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com.
(23:49):
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