Modern Era · North America · Science

1930

Pluto discovered from Arizona

1930

A twenty-four-year-old farm boy named Clyde Tombaugh, staring through a blink comparator at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, noticed a faint dot that had moved between photographs taken on consecutive nights. The ninth planet had been found, or so everyone said. Seventy-six years later astronomers would quietly demote it to dwarf-planet status. Tombaugh's widow was annoyed.