Tombaugh’s Widow “Shook Up”

Patricia Tombaugh, the widow of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, says she is "shook up" by the decision of the International Astronomical Union to redefine Pluto as a non-planet.

"I'm not heartbroken. I'm just shook up," Patricia Tombaugh, 93, said in a telephone interview from her home in Las Cruces.

Clyde Tombaugh was 24 when he discovered Pluto while working at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Ariz., in 1930. He spent months meticulously examining images of the sky, looking for a planet observatory founder Percival Lowell theorized was affecting the orbit of Uranus. Lowell was wrong — Pluto is too small to affect giant Neptune's orbit — but Tombaugh found it anyway.

Tombaugh, who died in 1997, was the only person in the Western Hemisphere to have discovered a planet in our solar system until Thursday, when the International Astronomical Union separated it from the eight "classical planets" and lumped it in with two similarly sized "dwarf planets."

Tombaugh had fought off other attempts to relegate Pluto, but his widow said this time he probably would have endorsed the change, now that other planetary objects have been discovered in the Kuiper Belt, the belt of comets on the edge of the solar system where Pluto resides.

"He was a scientist. He would understand they had a real problem when they start finding several of these things flying around the place," Patricia Tombaugh said.

She added that her husband had been resigned to the change.

"He knew it was on the way," she said. "Before he died, they were going around and around. Of course, he was disappointed. After 75 years of seeing it one way, who wouldn't be?"

One can only speculate, of course, but one wonders what the folks who voted to strip Pluto out of the family of planets have actually discovered in their careers. Consider the fact that it took another 60 years for other astronomers, working with exponentially more advanced equipment to discover another object the size of Pluto and 73 years to discover an even larger object. Clyde Tombaugh did it with a telescope similar to this one he posed with in 1980. He did it all by himself. In 1930.

(AP Photo/Dale Wittner)

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1. Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » Honk If Pluto Is Still A Planet — Friday, 25 August , 2006 @ 11:07 am