Discovery of Pluto

About eighty years ago, an astronomer working at the Lowell Observatory in the United States
discovered something that triggered a major change in the way we view the Solar System. The young
astronomer was Clyde Tombaugh, an assistant observer at the Lowell Observatory made famous by
the great astronomer, Percival Lowell. At the time, Tombaugh was continuing his search for a elusive
planet – planet X – which Lowell believed (though not in fact) was responsible for disrupting the orbits
of Uranus and Neptune.

In the following year, after spending many nights with the telescope “burning” the photographic
plates, then months of sifting through the plates for signs of a planet (a tedious job), Tombaugh found
the object he was looking for. search. At around four o'clock in the afternoon on February 18, 1930,
Tombaugh began comparing two plates taken in January showing an area within the constellation
Gemini. When he compared the two plates, trying to see if anything was moving (a sign that it might
be the planet he was looking for, not a star), he found something. At that time, a small object was
seen moving a few millimeters across the plate when he compared the two photographic plates (which
were taken at different times). Tombaugh discovered a new planet! (Stern & Mitton, 2005).

The Changing Landscape of the Solar System

The object Tombaugh discovered was named Pluto, a name officially adopted by the American
Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society in England, and the International Astronomical
Union (IAU). Pluto is a freezing cold world, billions of kilometers from Earth, and thirty times lighter
than the planet previously known as the smallest planet, Mercury. But Pluto is not alone. He was later
found to have five satellites. Charon, its largest satellite, was discovered in 1978. The other four
satellites were discovered using the Hubble Space Telescope, a space telescope, in 2005, 2011, and
2012, and officially named Nix and Hydra in early 2006 (read more), as well as Kerberos and Styx in
2013 by the IAU (read more).

Views on the landscape of the Solar System began to change since August 30, 1992 with the discovery
of an object by David Jewitt and Jane Luu from the University of Hawaii. The object was the first of
more than a thousand objects that were subsequently discovered orbiting farther from Neptune in
what has come to be known as the Trans-Neptunian region. These objects are generally classified as
Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs).

With more and more discoveries of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), it seems inevitable that one
object will eventually be discovered that rivals Pluto in size. On the evening of October 21, 2003, Mike
Brown of Caltech, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory and David Rabinowitz of Yale University
used a telescope and camera at the Palomar Observatory, United States, to survey the periphery of
the Solar System. That night, they took an image of an area in the sky that featured an object moving
relative to the background stars. After analysis, it turned out that they found a new cold world orbiting
the Sun, with a diameter of about 2500 km. Subsequent observations revealed that the object
(originally named 2003 UB313 based on the IAU protocol on the initial naming of similar objects) was
larger than Pluto and also contained a satellite. With the discovery of an object further away from
Neptune with a larger size and mass than Pluto and the continued discovery of Trans-Neptunian
objects, many astronomers have begun to wonder: "What exactly is a planet?"