how was pluto discoverd?

Answer 1

Pluto was found by Clyde Tombaugh at the Lowell Observatory, which was established by Percival Lowell. He dreamed of finding the 9th planet when it appeared that the orbit of Neptune appeared to be influenced by yet another planet as yet undiscovered. He hired Tombaugh to carry out the search after several previous attempts turned up nothing. Tombaugh carried out his search with photography. He systematically photographed the sky along the ecliptic with a 13-inch telescope. He then compared pairs of photographs he took of a region of sky on the opposite side of it from the Sun, one taken two or three days after the first photograph in a device called a blink comparator. It has a mirror that can be flipped so one or the other photograph can be examined at any one time. By flipping the mirror back and forth, Tombaugh found many moving objects which were comets or asteroids. Stationary objects such as stars and galaxies remained still, but anything that moves jumps back and forth as the mirror is flipped. In 1930, on a pair of photographs taken near the bright star Delta Gemorium, he found a 14th magnitude point of light that was moving, but much too slowly to be any asteroid. It's star like nature ruled out the possibility of it being a comet. It wasn't long before it was determine to be outside the orbit of Neptune, and thus declared the Solar System's 9th planet. Although it's no longer considered a planet, Pluto is still the first good sized body in the Solar System found since Neptune's discovery in 1846. Although Pluto was discovered in 1930, it turned up in photographs taken in previous surveys, and was accidentally recorded in 1905 and 1909 but went un-noticed. As more observations became available, it became clear Pluto could not possibly have been the cause of Neptune's perturbations, which were due to sketchy observations. It soon became clear after that that Pluto's discovery was more the result of Tombaugh's dogged and methodical approach to searching for it than astronomers computations, because the planet's predicted mass, orbit and other parameters well all dead wrong except for the position.

Answer 2

Percival Lowell put a young astronomy graduate on the job: Clyde Tombaugh from Illinois

Tombaugh was a farm kid from a Peoria farm and was a great student in HS back when most farmboys did not finish high school. Being a very promising student a local businessman (I think he was an auto dealer, not sure) offered to pay for his college education and Tombaugh studied astronomy, his love.

Tombaugh was given a piece of equipment that would allow sky photos to be loaded in two at a time and then a manual handle would be flipped back and forth so that your eye would be looking at one image and then another in quick succession.

The technique was to take two identical sky photos on different nights, load both into the machine and then painstakingly focus on every single star image in the entire field one at a time. After several months of this drudgery he was able to spot one that had moved from one image to the next. Additional sightings confirmed the observation.

The area of the sky that was being searched was chosen because of anomalies in the expected orbit of Neptune, whcih was the planet last discoverd.

Tombaugh's work was done in 1930. Incidentally until he died in the mid 90s speculation that Pluto is not "really" a planet was not formally considered by the planetary science community, out of respect for the elder statesman in their field. That is why once the subject did come up the decision was made relatively quickly (at least for science), because a lot of people already had their minds made up, but were waiting for his death before doing anything about it.

Pluto is now termed a "minor planet" along with several other objects in that remote regon of our solar system.

They never have found the object causing the wobble in Neptune's orbit.

Answer 3

Pluto was discovered by Clyde Tombaugh who was really looking in the night sky for a 9th planet for a project at lowell observatory as he was taking pictures of the night sky (which he took 2 weeks apart) while he was looking at the pictures he noticed a possible moving object on the pictures taken on January 23 and January 29 then he sent those pictures with other evidence of pluto being there to the harvord college observatory Pluto was later be found on photographs dating back to March 19, 1915.

Answer 4

With a lot of patience, night after night, at a 'blink comparator'. My late friend, Dr. Clyde Tombaugh,found Pluto in 1930 when he was only about 20 years old. He wrote a fun book about it, with a lot of biographical things, called 'Out of the Darkness-The Discovery of the Planet Pluto.' Your library should have it. I'm not saying this because he's not here anymore, but he was perhaps the sweetest, smartest man I've ever met. God bless him. Clear skies!

Answer 5

some one was studying the orbit of neptune and found out that it was distorted and did not match his calculations
he concluded that there was another body out there and proved it using math and not a telescope

ha, ha, don't use yahoo answers to try to get points because if you are, then get a life

Answer 6

I hope someone answers. :o)

lol funny that angered someone. I really wanted to know too! Some people take this stuff way to seriously. What are you afraid i'm taking points that could be yours? hahaha toooo funny! They aren't money you can let it go now!

Answer 7

I think Mickey just found him running around one day..