Asked how it feels to have discovered a planet, Clyde Tombaugh falls back on a ridiculous adjective "nice."
It has been 52 years since the day Tombaugh established that there was a planet out there that no astronomer had ever glimpsed.
If the Pluto probe finally does take off, no one on this planet will be watching with quite the sam emotions as Clyde Tombaugh. Pluto, you see, is Tombaugh's baby.
The day in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered the planet Pluto using a machine called a blink comparator, he spent a nail-biting 90 minutes watching Gary Cooper star in The Virginian, hoping that when he emerged from the moviehouse the cloud cover would have lifted, and he could take a second look through the telescope at Lowell Observatory, to confirm his finding.
He was too excited to read, he was not permitted to telephone family or friends with the news, he was unable to think with any clarity. He watched the western, particularly the gunfight scene, in an agony of apprehension. It wasn't until the next night that Tombaugh and two colleagues stood at the lens in on a mountaintop in Flagstaff, AZ and viewed "Planet X" for the first time with human eyes.
The meaning of all this shivering? For years, astronomers had supposed Pluto was up there. Percival Lowell, who built the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff -- and who was the first person to suggest that Mars had canals, and that a race of intelligent Martians must exist -- had scanned the heavens for many years searching for the unnamed planet. The search for a TransNeptunian body was one of the great quests of astronomy -- the barrier would most likely fall to the most senior and most seasoned of living skywatchers.
Young Tombaugh, brought to the observatory at age 23, found the tiny dot in the skies after only a year and 40,000 blink comparator attempts. The young man from the plains states became the only individual in the 20th century -- the only person since J.C. Galle discovered Neptune in 1846 and William Herschel's discovery of Uranus in 1781 -- to find a brand new world.
The new world was named Pluto by Tombaugh and the other Lowell astronomers, after first considering Chronos (some say the first two letters are an homage to Percival Lowell). Pluto was the furthest from the sun (3.66 billion miles from the sun, on average), and experienced the longest year (it revolved around the sun every 248 years, compared to Earth's 365 days).
Pluto may have been a satellite of Neptune that ages ago escaped and went into orbit around the sun instead. It was a cold world, typically a brisk -360`F, and it occupied the most tilted and elliptical orbit of any planet. Pluto, named after the dark region of death, and its slightly smaller moon, the dismal boatman Charon, are very likely two gaseous icebergs bobbing through the nether regions of space.
Today, at 86, Clyde Tombaugh is still scanning the night skies. Thousands of nights spent poring through the infinite expanse around us, he is still capable of a good shiver.
"I always say that it feels nice to have discovered a planet," Tombaugh says. "Nice" might not be the most adequate word to describe such a claim, but then, what would be? The magnitude of the universe, Tombaugh says, has kept him from getting a swelled head about his achievements.
After all, he said, Pluto is one small, planet, the furthest one we know about in a single solar system. "It's been calculated that the number of stars in the universe is up around 1021 -- that's 10 to the 21st power, which rounds off to about one septillion stars, of which our sun is one.
"Someone has said that this means that there are about 100 stars in the universe for every grain of sand on all the beaches and in all the oceans and seas of our world."
Does that mean Tombaugh grasps the immensity of what is any better than ordinary people?
Tombaugh is matter-of-fact in his awe. "I've worked with it all my life, so think I can understand a bit," he says. "In high school I calculated, based upon what we knew of the star Betelgeuse, what its mass was, and came up with one duodecillion cubic inches. That's a 1, with 39 zeroes lined after it."
And of all those septillion stars, he said, it is a reasonable expectation that there are many trillions of planets, and of those trillions there are, in all likelihood, more than a few thousand capable, as our Earth is, of supporting life. Given those odds, there are probably other astronomers out there discovering planets as he did, fairly routinely. So his achievements benefit, sort of, from the very sort of perspective they helped create.
Back in Illinois, where he grew up, geography had been an abiding interest, until one day he looked up from the mundane plattes and maps of the prairie and glimpsed the greater cosmography beyond.
With the family's move in 1922 to the clear prairie skies of Kansas, Clyde constructed his first telescope for night viewing, his gazing halted by a hailstorm that destroyed the family wheat crop -- Clyde had to work as farmhand to make ends meet. Though untrained and lacking the polish of students at the great observatories, he had the requisite patience for standing still for hours observing minute changes in the skies. In addition to passion, he had great, undeniable talent, which did not go unnoticed by Lowell Observatory, which hired him to assist in astronomical research.
Fourteen months later, comparing images on his blink comparator, a tool for detecting changes in position of faraway objects by juxtaposing photographic images of where the object may be, he noticed the discrepant dot which was Planet X. "That's it," he recalls thinking.
And it it was. As the father of Pluto -- and as the namesake of the radioactive element plutonium, named, like uranium and neptunium, after the outer planets -- Tombaugh has garnered enough laurels for most individuals. Within astronomical circles, however, he is perhaps more celebrated for the sheer volume of his discoveries and output. The prevailing view is that his discovery of an 1,800-galaxy star supercluster is more important all by itself, and that a lifetime of discoveries of galactic star clusters, asteroids, and observations of the Moon, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn have yielded much, much more in terms of human knowledge.
As a scientist, Tombaugh said, one is exposed every day to things that would amaze most people, though most if the work is pretty static. But he still feels the same thrill he felt as a boy in Kansas. "It still really boggles my mind sometimes, it's so magnificent and overwhelming. The sense of wonder never goes away. To this day my favorite moments are those spent looking through the telescope -- I've built several, and have one at home, a 16-inch instrument I made in 1960.
Tombaugh is author of several books: The TransNeptunian Planet Search (1961), The Geology of Mars, and, (coauthored with Dr. Patrick Moore) Out of the Darkness: The Planet Pluto (1980). Though retired from his professorship at New mexico State University, he continues as astronomer emeritus, and has not lost track of the planets' comings and goings.
Patricia Tombaugh, Clyde's wife for 53 years, got used early on to having a husband whose thoughts were more often on the goings-on in the next galaxy than next door. The same for his two children, five granddaughters, and four great grandsons. Tombaugh smiles -- discovering a world can't hold a candle to populating one.
In 1980, the golden anniversary of Pluto's discovery, a panel of astronomers and physicists met in Las Cruces to pay tribute to Tombaugh and to summarize what has since been learned about the strangest and furthest of the known solar objects.
It was announced at that time, too, that a planetoid object until then known only as Minor Planet 1604 (1931 FH), one of dozens of asteroids discovered by Tombaugh during his sojourns among he stars, had been named and registered as "Tombaugh" in his honor. Tombaugh's comment was that at last he had a piece of real estate no one could touch.
Could there be yet another Planet X, out beyond Tombaugh's? Tombaugh doesn't know, no one does, but there's room enough. As far away as it is, it's still nowhere near the edge of the solar system, he says. Pluto is only 39 AUs [astronomical units] away from the sun -- the nearest other star, Proxima Centauri, is 270 AUs away. Some people talk about an alter-ego to Earth known as Nemesis, invisibly opposite the Sun from us. And a host of comets and asteroids range through the outer regions. Other planets, other worlds -- why not?
For one thing, Clyde Tombaugh would not deny to other humans the unique sensations that come with uttering, "That's it."
Clyde Tombaugh died in 1996.
Michael Finley is a St. Paul-based writer specializing in issues of technology, management, and quality.
Copyright (c) 1992 by Michael Finley. All rights reserved.
"A masterpiece of explanatory journalism!" - New Orleans Picayune |
I enjoyed serving this essay up for you, and I did
it for free. But I am a few clients lighter right now than I need to be,
and a bit of revenue never hurts.
If you'd like to contribute to this site, consider dropping a $1 tip in the "Honor
Box" here. Think of it as a voluntary subscription. Just click the CLICK TO
PAY image here. Thanks! - Mike
Total tips, year
to date: $203.00 - MANY THANKS!
| ||||
