Astronomers have made tremendous advances in space exploration over the past 100 years. They have found pulsars, neutron stars, even discovered planets outside the Milky Way!
But here's the paradox: what we have at our side is often a secret behind seven seals. We are talking about Pluto, a celestial body discovered more than 80 years ago. Astronomers know very little about him and call him the strangest and most mysterious in the entire solar system.
Pluto's discovery story is one of the most difficult. For the first time, the outstanding American astronomer Percival Lowell spoke about the existence of the ninth planet. In 1905, he made a sensational statement: there are not eight, but nine planets in the solar system! The statement thundered like a bolt from the blue. Scientists demanded proof.
“Please,” Lowell said, and released his own findings. The unknown planet is located on the outskirts of the solar system. By itself, it is just a crumb compared to the rest of the planets. Nevertheless, she is the culprit of the so-called indignation of Uranus and Neptune, which everyone has known for a long time, but could not explain it.
“The ninth planet,” Lowell inflamed, “is located about six billion kilometers from the Sun, and it takes 282 years to complete a revolution around the Sun.” Colleagues listened carefully to the discoverer, but the evidence provided was not enough for them. However, Lowell had nothing more to cover.
I HAVE AN IDEA
Percival was not going to back down. Yes, he greatly lacked more accurate instruments, but he found a way out. He knew that the celestial anonym was slowly moving against the background of hundreds of thousands of stationary stars in the star-rich region of the Milky Way. The tiny planet should emit light, albeit weak. Only by highlighting this luminous point moving across the sky can we talk about the discovery of the planet.
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How to distinguish it from the endless sea of stars? At the Flagstaff Observatory in Arizona, at night, he pointed a photographic telescope at a group of stars, among which was to be the planet X. The astronomer recorded the time - it took the camera three hours to collect the starlight.
In the morning Percival developed the plate and put it aside. Further - according to the same scheme. At night, he set up the telescope again, aimed the camera and began photographing the sky for the same three hours. The next day came a crucial moment. Lowell developed a second plate and superimposed it on the first so that all the stars were exactly aligned. Then he armed himself with a magnifying glass and bent over the records. According to his forecasts, if the two stars do not converge, it means that he has attacked the trail of planet X.
Hour after hour Lowell studied the records and suddenly saw two mismatched points. He was shaking with excitement. He barely waited for the night to now take an aiming photograph of this part of the sky. In the morning I developed a picture - the discrepancy is obvious. It seemed that victory could be trumpeted. But something told Lowell that the "mismatched" celestial body was moving too quickly. Intuition did not disappoint: it was an asteroid!
THE PROCESS HAS BEEN DELAYED
Lowell had many more disappointments to go through, but he did not give up. Every night he went up to the observatory tower, pointed the telescope and photographed the sky, and in the morning developed the pictures. The astronomer discovered hundreds of asteroids - just not planet X. The day took shape in weeks, weeks in months, months in years … Another in his place would have given up this seemingly hopeless venture a long time ago, but Lowell was not one of those.
Over the course of several years, he lost a lot - he lost weight, grew thin, became nervous, irritable. But he didn’t give up what he started! In those rare moments when Percival was away, his assistants took on the search. Before leaving, the chief instructed them: as soon as they were lucky enough to find planet X, IMMEDIATELY telegraph him! Alas, the assistants were also stubbornly unlucky. This did not stop Lowell from joking on this topic: “I report to the academy on my work on January 13th. It would be a great courtesy of you to announce the opening just in time for this."
Lowell was sure that sooner or later he would be lucky. But the body could not stand the stress of many years. On November 12, 1916, Percival died suddenly of a stroke. He was buried in his favorite place - in the city of Flagstaff on Mars Hill, where he spent many hours looking for the cherished planet in the starry sky.
YOUNG YES EARLY
In 1929, a young and promising astronomer, Clyde Tombaugh, appeared at the observatory where Lowell worked. A new powerful telescope turned out to be very useful to him. Clyde followed the same principle as Lowell. With the help of improved technology, he photographed that part of the sky where the planet X could lurk, developed, compared the plates - and so on ad infinitum … But fortune was more merciful to Clyde: a year later, namely on March 13, 1930, he announced the discovery of a new planet.
She was named Pluto - the first two letters correspond to the initials of Percival Lowell. It turned out that Lowell was simply out of luck. He himself could have discovered his planet, and twice, if not an absurd accident. For the first time, the image of Pluto on one of the two plates fell on a small defect of the emulsion, in the second, it was partially superimposed on another planet.
STRONG STONE
And yet Lowell miscalculated a little. The celestial body revolved around the Sun not in 282 years, but in 248 years. Then other, less pleasant discoveries followed! Scientists began to doubt: is Pluto a planet at all? It shines something too dimly - this time, it lacks a distinguishable planetary disk - two, has a mass too small for a planet - three.
In 1978, when Pluto-Charon was discovered (later classified as a binary planet), it was again "weighted". And again, a surprise - the mass of Pluto turned out to be negligible - about 0.2% of the mass of the Earth. Not enough to bear the proud name of the planet! The Voyager 2 spacecraft added cause for concern in 1989.
The data received from him caused confusion in the orderly ranks of scientists. Pluto is comparable in size to the Moon, only it weighs six times less! And then an embarrassment happened. Some astronomers, without a shadow of embarrassment, declared: the Lowell planet does not exist, Tombo discovered … an asteroid. What started here! Scientists almost got into a fight. And only on August 24, 2006 they agreed:
Pluto is not an ordinary, but a dwarf planet.
SHINE TO SHADOW
Meanwhile, the mysterious Pluto, as if testing the nervous system of astronomers for strength, continues to throw surprises.
Until recently, it was believed that Saturn has the lowest density in the solar system. Now scientists are not sure of this, because Pluto consists of loose ice formed by frozen volatile substances. But most of all scientists are worried about something else - the strange brilliance of Pluto, or rather, its almost complete absence. Over the past 10 years, the planet has approached the Sun and Earth, which means that it should be illuminated at least one and a half times more.
But Pluto began to shine weaker! How can this be? Scientists shrug their shoulders and only speculate. Maybe he turned to us with a darker side? Is the ice on its surface evaporating for some unknown reason? Pluto was bombarded by a meteorite and it raised an eerie column of dust?
In the meantime, serious scientists shrug their shoulders, alternative science offers its version. Allegedly, Pluto is a transshipment base, and at the same time a kind of laboratory for aliens. For a long time they calmly made their flights to Earth from there, without fear of being noticed. But when Pluto began to be closely studied, they tried to literally fog up.
Is it true or not? Everything will become clear in the near future. In 2015, the New Horizons spacecraft sent by NASA will come close to Pluto, and then the mysterious planet will reveal many of its secrets.
Andrey PALKO, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences