PLUTO

The right to name the new object belonged to the Lowell Observatory. Tombaugh urged Slipher to suggest a name for the new object quickly before someone else did.^[17] Name suggestions poured in from all over the world. Constance Lowell proposed Zeus, then Lowell, and finally her own first name. These suggestions were disregarded.^[22]

The name Pluto was first suggested by Venetia Burney (later Venetia Phair), an eleven-year-old schoolgirl in Oxford, England.^[23] Venetia was interested in classical mythology as well as astronomy, and considered the name, one of the alternate names of Hades, the Greek god of the Underworld, appropriate for such a presumably dark and cold world. She suggested it in a conversation with her grandfather Falconer Madan, a former librarian of Oxford University's Bodleian Library. Madan passed the name to Professor Herbert Hall Turner, who then cabled it to colleagues in America.^[24]

The object was officially named on March 24, 1930.^[25] Each member of the Lowell Observatory was allowed to vote on a short-list of three: "Minerva" (which was already the name for an asteroid), "Cronus" (which had garnered a bad reputation after being suggested by an unpopular astronomer named Thomas Jefferson Jackson See), and Pluto. Pluto received every vote.^[26] The name was announced on May 1, 1930.^[23] Upon the announcement, Madan gave Venetia five pounds as a reward.^[23]

The name Pluto was intended to evoke the initials of the astronomer Percival Lowell, a desire echoed in the P-L monogram that is Pluto's astronomical symbol ().^[27] Pluto's astrological symbol resembles that of Neptune (), but has a circle in place of the middle prong of the trident ().

In Chinese, Japanese, Korean the name was translated as underworld king star (冥王星),^[28]^[29] as suggested by Houei Nojiri in 1930.^[30] Many other non-European languages use a transliteration of "Pluto" as their name for the object; however, some Indian languages may use a form of Yama, the Guardian of Hell in Hindu mythology, such as the Gujarati Yamdev.^[28] Vietnamese also uses the Vietnamese name for Yama (Diêm Vương) as the name of the planet.

Demise of Planet X

Once found, Pluto's faintness and lack of a resolvable disc cast doubt on the idea that it could be Lowell's Planet X. Throughout the mid-20th century, estimates of Pluto's mass were often revised downward. In 1978, the discovery of Pluto's moon Charon allowed the measurement of Pluto's mass for the first time. Its mass, roughly 0.2 percent that of the Earth, was far too small to account for the discrepancies in Uranus. Subsequent searches for an alternate Planet X, notably by Robert Sutton Harrington,^[31] failed. In 1993, Myles Standish used data from Voyager 2's 1989 flyby of Neptune, which had revised the planet's total mass downward by 0.5 percent, to recalculate its gravitational effect on Uranus. With the new figures added in, the discrepancies, and with them the need for a Planet X, vanished.^[32] Today the overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that Planet X, as Lowell defined it, does not exist. Lowell had made a prediction of Planet X's position in 1915 that was fairly close to Pluto's actual position at that time; however, Ernest W. Brown concluded almost immediately that this was a coincidence, a view still held today.

PLUTO

Jumat, 30 Januari 2009

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Demise of Planet X

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