Clyde Tombaugh, a teenage scientist, observed a small, frozen object outside the established solar system's telescope 91 years earlier this week. Here comes Pluto.
For around 15 years before that, astronomers had speculated the presence of Pluto. Astronomer Percival Lowell had reported anomalies in Neptune and Uranus' orbits that indicated another body's gravitational force.
Lowell finally died without knowing, as he named it, the elusive "Planet X," His thesis started with Tombaugh.
As he found Pluto, for a while, Planet X became real. But in 2003, in the Kuiper Belt, the area outside Neptune that is believed to hold trillions of other ice bodies, a planet bigger than Pluto, was discovered. That eventually prompted Pluto to be reclassified as a dwarf planet by the International Astronomical Union.
People Still Wonder Whether Pluto Is Indeed a Dwarf Planet
Cue the anger of space enthusiasts and others who wasted hours attempting to memorize the planets' right order.
This shift in status was all brought about by a vote at the IAU astronomers' meeting in Prague on August 24, 2006. The vote included only over 400 out of the thousands of astronomers around the world who remained for the last day of the conference.
The celestial status of Pluto moved when the vote provided for the redefinition of what a world is. This is what the resolution proclaimed:
Planet: A celestial body in orbit around the Sun has enough mass to conquer "rigid body forces" for its own gravity and assumes a "nearly round" form and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.
Dwarf planet: A planetary entity in orbit around the Sun, has enough mass to withstand "rigid body forces" for its own gravity and assumes a "nearly round" form, has freed the region around its orbit.
"Pluto now falls into the dwarf planet category on account of its size and the fact that it resides within a zone of other similarly-sized objects known as the transneptunian region," the IAU said.
However, several planetary scientists also believe it's a planet.
"How can an adjective in front of a noun not describe the noun?" Alan Stern, the principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons probe, said in an interview in 2017. "There are dwarf stars, but they're still considered stars."
The New Horizons mission was initiated in 2016 to study Pluto, its moons, and the Kuiper Belt. The probe sent back unparalleled pictures of Pluto and other remote space objects, some of our earliest images of the dwarf planet, and what the exploration of the solar system taught us.
The temperature on Pluto is around minus 375 degrees Fahrenheit, scientists say. NASA estimates that it's about 133 degrees colder than the coldest temperature in the Antarctic ever reported.
However, some scientists and space enthusiasts fail to offer Pluto the recognition they think it merits.
The I Love Pluto 2021 Festival
To mark the 91st anniversary of Pluto's discovery by Clyde Tombaugh on February 18, 1930, Arizona's Lowell Observatory organized a week-long I Heart Pluto festival from February 13 to 18. The free virtual activities, conducted every evening of the festival, can be attended by anyone. It is estimated that most activities will last around one hour.
The Lowell Observatory calls itself the "Home of Pluto." The presence of a trans-Neptunian entity was postulated and looked for by Percival Lowell, a wealthy American businessman with a fascination for astronomy, until his death in 1916. His estate is controlled by Lowell's brother, president A. Lawrence Lovell, of Harvard University.
Lawrence Lovell also donated funds for a modern telescope at the existing Lowell Observatory, which is still intact. Clyde Tombaugh began Lowell's search utilizing this telescope. He observed motions on photographic plates taken in late January, on February 18, 1930. On March 13, 1930, the finding was revealed on what would have been Lowell's 75th birthday.
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