Abstract
From its discovery at the Lowell Observatory in February 1930 to the present time, Pluto has always been a problem. First, was it discovered by chance? Or was it predicted? That problem took over 60 years to resolve. Most recently, a debate flared over its status as a planet. If it is a planet, what kind of planet? That question has just barely been resolved and is a valuable study in the complex process of consensus formation.1 In between, Pluto presented astronomers with many other problems, from explaining its lopsided orbit to determining its origin. Was it an escaped moon of Neptune, or did it form as a planetary body in the original solar nebula? Recounting these problems—why they were raised and how they were resolved—reveals not only critical stages in twentieth-century astronomy when our conception of the nature and extent of the solar system itself changed in profound ways, but a period of time when we learned that systems of planets themselves circling other stars are not rare occurrences due to chance, but are common in the universe arising through processes intrinsic to the formation of stars themselves. Pluto, we now realize, is the first inhabitant to be detected in a vast region of the solar system that, in its aggregate of countless thousands to millions of cold little bodies orbiting in a belt around the sun, are directly visible from interstellar distances.
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Notes
Lisa R. Messeri, “The Problem with Pluto: Conflicting Cosmologies and the Classification of Planets,” Social Studies of Science 40 (2010): 187–214, explores factors that guided astronomers’ reactions to the demotion. The appearance of her work, as I was revising this present chapter, which grew out of a talk given over seven years ago, has had very positive influence on the revision. I am indebted to readers of that essay as well as an earlier draft of the present form; the comments kindly provided by Owen Gingerich, Brian Marsden, Neil Tyson, Goetz Höppe, and Michael Neufeld were of great help. Archival material from the Lowell Observatory as well as Princeton University is acknowledged, as well as oral history material from the American Institute of Physics and the National Air and Space Museum. This work was supported in part by a grant from the NASA history office. Abbreviations used in the notes include: LowA–Lowell Observatory Archives; HUA–Harvard University Archives; VMS–V. M. Slipher; PUL/HNR–Princeton University Library, Henry Norris Russell papers; AIP–American Institute of Physics, Center for History of Physics; KP/UAZ–Kuiper Papers, University of Arizona.
W. G. Hoyt, Planets X and Pluto (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1980), pp. 84–85. The best biography of Lowell is: David Strauss, Percival Lowell—The Culture and Science of a Boston Brahmin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).
V. M. Slipher to Russell, May 12, 1928; Putnam to Slipher, May 28, 1928; LowA/VMS/RLP. Russell, “Summary of Requests for Grants For Astronomy,” attached to Russell to Hale, May 28, 1928; PUL/HNR, Box 19, folder 21. On the still-born National Research Fund, see Lance E. Davis and Daniel J. Kevles, “The National Research Fund: A Case Study in the Industrial Support of Academic Science,” Minerva 12, 2 (April 1974): 207–20.
Tombaugh’s character is well explored in David H. Levy, Clyde Tombaugh: Discoverer of Planet Pluto (Cambridge, MA: Sky Publishing, 2006).
David H. DeVorkin, Henry Norris Russell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 307.
Shapley to Slipher, March 20, 1930. LowA/VMS.
On naming conventions in planetary astronomy, governed by International Astronomical Union rules, see http://www.iau.org/public_press/themes/naming/ (accessed January 29, 2010).
Gustav Lindenthal, “Origin of the Solar System,” New York Times, March 30, 1930, p. E5.
Armin Leuschner, 1932, “The Astronomical Romance of Pluto,” PASP 44, 260 (August 1932): 197–214, from 197 to 98, 210, 213.
Raymond J. Lyttleton, “On the Possible Results of an Encounter of Pluto with the Neptunian System,” MNRAS 36 (1937): 108–15; “The Origin of the Solar System,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 96 (1928): 559–68; H. N. Russell, The Solar System and its Origin (New York: Macmillan, 1935). At the time of Lyttleton’s work, Neptune had only one moon. Nereid was discovered by Kuiper in 1949.
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E. Öpik, “On the Fundamental Problem of Meteor Statistics,” Harvard College Observatory Circular 355 (1930): 1–12
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Fred L. Whipple “Upper Atmosphere Densities and Temperatures from Meteor Observations,” Popular Astronomy 47 (1939): 419–25; “The Incentive of a Bold Hypothesis: Hyperbolic Meteors and Comets,” in R. Berendzen, ed., Education in and History of Modern astronomy [NY Acad. Sci. 198 (1972): 219–24], reprinted in The Collected Contributions of Fred L. Whipple (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1972), pp. 3–17.
Whipple OHI, p. 53. See: Richard A. Jarrell, “Canadian Meteor Science: The First Phase, 1933–1990,” Journal of Astronomical History and Heritage 12 No. 3 (2009): 224–234.
Ronald E. Doel, Solar System Astronomy in America: Communities, Patronage and Interdisciplinary Research, 1920–1960 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), especially chapters 3 and 4.
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David H. DeVorkin, Science with a Vengeance (New York: Springer Verlag, 1996); Peter Millman, “A Size Classification of Meteoritic Material Encountered by the Earth,” JRASC 46 (1952): 79–82.
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G. P. Kuiper, “Titan: A Satellite with an Atmosphere,” ApJ 100 (1944): 378–83. Kuiper explicitly mentioned that the Eastman 1N emulsions were slow. This is the first mention of this product in any publication scanned by the Astrophysics Data Service.
Ingrid Groeneveld and Gerard P. Kuiper, “Photometric Studies of Asteroids. I,” ApJ 120 (1956): 200–219, on 219.
J. A. Hynek, ed., Astrophysics: A Topical Symposium (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1951), p. v.
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G. P. Kuiper, “Further Studies on the Origin of Pluto,” ApJ 125 (1957): 287–89.
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Alan Boss, The Crowded Universe (New York: Basic Books, 2007); Tyson, The Pluto Files; Alan Boyle, The Case for Pluto (New York: Wiley, 2010). Messeri makes the case for how these conflicts led to a “forced consensus” over a formal definition of planet, and Pluto’s ultimate reclassification.
C. J. Cohen and E. C. Hubbard, Science 145 (1964): 1336; reported in Ann Ewing, “Pluto Theories Crumble,” Science News Letter 86 (October 3, 1964): 213.
Fred L. Whipple, “Evidence for a Comet Belt Beyond Neptune,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 51 (May 15, 1964): 711–18.
Tom Gehrels, “Future Work,” in Tom Gehrels, ed., Physical Studies of Minor Planets, Proceedings of IAU Colloq. 12 (Washington, DC: NASA SP-267, 1971), pp. 653–62, on p. 654.
G. P. Kuiper, Y. Fujita, T. Gehrels, I. Groeneveld, J. Kent, G. van Biesbroeck, and C. J. van Houten, “Survey of Asteroids,” Astrophysical Journal Supplement 3 (1958): 289–334 and tables.
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A good summary of the contributions of Voyager imagery to planetary science is Ronald A. Schorn, Planetary Astronomy from Ancient Times to the Third Millennium (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998), pp. 274–79.
Julio A. Fernandez, “On the Existence of a Comet Belt beyond Neptune,” Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 192 (1980): 481–91.
Davies, Beyond Pluto, p. 46; Brush, “Theories of the Origin of the Solar System”; Martin Duncan, Thomas Quinn, and Scott Tremaine, “The Origin of Short-Period Comets,” Astrophysical Journal 328 (May 15, 1988): L69– L73, quotes from L69; L70. Based upon a search using the Astrophysics Data Service, this is the first paper that describes the zone explicitly as the “Kuiper Belt,” L72.
C. T. Kowal, William Liller, and Brian Marsden “The Discovery and Orbit of 1977 UB,” Bull. Am. Astron. Soc. 10 (1978): 481; C. T. Kowal, “Chiron,” in Tom Gehrels, ed. Asteroids (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979), pp. 436–39.
David Jewitt, and Jane Luu, “Reflection Spectrum of the Kuiper Belt Object 1993 SC,” Astronomical Journal 111 (1996): 499–503; Davies, Beyond Pluto, p. 84.
On naming conventions in planetary astronomy, governed by International Astronomical Union rules, see http://www.iau.org/public_press/themes /naming/ (accessed January 29, 2010).
Mike Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David Rabinowitz, “Discovery of a Candidate Inner Oort Cloud Planetoid,” ApJ Letters (August 2004); ApJ 635 (2005), L97–L100; Alan P. Boss, The Crowded Universe: The Search for Living Planets (New York: Basic Books 2009), pp. 115–17.
David Jewitt, “The Discovery of the Kuiper Belt,” Astronomy Beat No. 48 (May 3, 2010), www.astrosociety.org., p. 4; Fernandez, “On the Existence of a Comet Belt beyond Neptune.”
Neil DeGrasse Tyson, The Pluto Files (New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2009), pp. 61–62.
David H. Freedman, “When is a Planet Not a Planet?” The Atlantic (February 1998).
“The IAU draft definition of ‘planet’ and ‘plutons,’ ” IAU Press release IAU0601: http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/detail/iau0601/ (accessed January 29, 2010).
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DeVorkin, D.H. (2013). Pluto: The Problem Planet and its Scientists. In: Launius, R.D. (eds) Exploring the Solar System. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137273178_14
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