Abstract
It is convenient to regard 1915—the date Einstein derived the correct rate of advance of the perihelion of Mercury—as marking the dénouement of the intramercurial planet hypothesis. Yet by the 1880s, most astronomers had concluded the planet did not exist. By then Le Verrier’s “mythical birds” had scattered.
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Notes and References
E. S. Holden to D. O. Mills, February 6, 1888; Mary Lea Shane Archives of the Lick Observatory.
W. H. Pickering, “A Search for a Planet Beyond Neptune,” Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College 61, 113 (1909); see also W. G. Hoyt, “William Henry Pickering’s Planetary Predictions and the Discovery of Pluto,” Isis 67, 551–564 (1976).
J. B. A. Gaillot, “Tables nouvelle des mouvements d’Uranus et de Neptune,” Annales de l’Observatorie de Paris 28 (1909).
J. B. A. Gaillot, “Contribution à la recherche des planètes ultra-neptuniennes,” Compte Rendu 148, 754–758 (1909).
W. G. Hoyt, Planets X and Pluto (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), p. 85.
P. Lowell, “Memoir on a Trans-Neptunian Planet,” Memoirs of the Lowell Observatory 1, 8 (1915).
Ibid., 101.
Clyde Tombaugh to William Sheehan, personal correspondence, April 27, 1990.
Mark Littmann, “Where is Planet X?” Sky and Telescope 78, 596–599 (December 1989). Also Littmann, Planets Beyond: Discovering the Outer Solar System (New York: Wiley, 1990), contains a discussion of these recent efforts. Harrington, by the way, assumed that Tombaugh could not have missed Planet X, so he concentrated his searches in the southern Milky Way below Tombaugh’s declination cut-off.
E. Myles Standish, Jr., “Planet X: No Dynamical Evidence in the Optical Observations,” Astronomical Journal 105, 2000–2006:2005 (1995).
Thomas Van Flandern to William Sheehan, personal correspondence, May 1, 1996, writes: “My understanding is that Standish has not removed the zonal systematic errors from his data. He considered the observational accuracy too poor to be worth the effort. But the data we at the U.S. Naval Observatory analyzed was first carefully corrected zone by zone by determining the actual average errors in the 19th-century star positions using modern star observations extrapolated backwards, then applying these average errors to correct Uranus (and also Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune, which also show systematic trends). Finally, many observations within short time spans were averaged to form normal points, in which the scatter due to random error was pretty minimal, and systematic trends stood out.” Unfortunately, Van Flandern finds the residuals do not thus far allow a unique solution for the position of an unknown planet.”
For a useful review, see Jane X. Luu and David C. Jewitt, “The Kuiper Belt,” Scientific American 274, 46–53 (May 1996).
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© 1997 Richard Baum and William Sheehan
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Baum, R., Sheehan, W. (1997). epilogue: The Unending Quest. In: In Search of Planet Vulcan. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-6100-6_19
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