Written by: Sauharda Bajracharya - 26010, Grade VIII
Posted on: 28 June, 2021
We all know that there are 8 planets in our Solar system excluding Pluto. And we also know that Pluto was removed from the planet list for being a ‘Dwarf planet’. But today, I am going to give you more information about Pluto’s history and why Pluto is no longer a planet. In 1902, astronomer Percival Lowell noted that there was a planet beyond Neptune. Lowell had started to search for the mysterious planet which he named ‘Planet X’. Lowell died in 1916 and until 1927 no one talked about ‘Planet X’. But 11 years after his death, the search for ‘Planet X’ began again. A new telescope was built especially for the search. The assistant of Lowell Observatory, Clyde Tombaugh took many pictures of ‘Planet X’. Tombaugh compared many pictures with a blink comparator and Tombaugh found Pluto between two plates in January 1930. The discovery of Planet X was officially announced on March 13, 1930 and the news was shared all over the world and they were asking for a name for the ‘Planet X’. The next day Falconer Madan, who was the Head of the Library at Oxford University, read the news at breakfast with her 11-year-old daughter, Venetia. Venetia suggested ‘Pluto’, the Roman god of the underworld. Many other names were suggested but ‘Pluto’ was chosen because it had the 2 first letters of Percival Lowell. On June 22, 1978, they discovered a moon in Pluto. After 27 years in 2005, they found two more moons on Pluto. But on August 24, 2006, the IAU(International Astronomical Union) classified Pluto as a planet. Pluto had met all the criteria for being a planet except for one which was it had not cleared its neighboring region of other objects.” They also made Eris, Ceres and Pluto be the first three dwarf planets.
